ANB 1002 Introduction to LiteratureCollege of Nyíregyháza

Dr. Tukacs Tamás

Table of Contents

I. WHAT IS LITERATURE? 2

II. APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 5

III. LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE 13

IV. ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE FICTION 18

1. WHAT: PLOT AND STORY 18

2. WHO: THE CHARACTER 23

3. WHERE: THE SETTING 27

4. WHEN: TIME AND NARRATIVE 29

5. HOW: STYLE, TONE, NARRATIVE VOICE AND PERSPECTIVE 30

6. OTHER PROPERTIES OF NARRATIVE FICTION 34

V. POETRY 36

1. PROSODY 36

2. RHETORIC, TROPES, FIGURES OF SPEECH 45

3. ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL 48

VI. DRAMA 51

1. TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC 51

2. COMEDY AND THE COMIC 55

3. THE TYPOLOGY OF DRAMA 58

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I. WHAT IS LITERATURE?

First, we have to define the field we are going to deal with: According to Wellek and Warren, there are three fields of literary studies or literary criticism (irodalomtudomány):

1. Review (“kritika”) – the analysis of one (or a few) particular work(s) of art.

2. Literary history (“irodalomtörténet”) – views literature in its historical progress

3. Literary theory – deals with the most general questions of literature, independently of time and seek general answers to the question, “what is literature?”, “what makes a text literary?” or “how does a work of art mean what it means?”, “where is its meaning?”

Obviously, there are hundreds of definitions of what we mean by “literature”.

We are going to look at some definitions and examine the problems pertaining to them.

1. The word “literature” has several meanings. In everyday sense, we mean novels, poems, plays, and so on, BUT we may also talk about the literature (“szakirodalom”) of a given scientific area, e.g., the literature available on brain surgery. Technically, we should speak about “belles lettres” (“szépirodalom”).

2. Literature, in a very general sense, is a set of recorded and public texts. BUT: Does everything that is recorded and public count as literature? Think of “practical” texts like manuals or treaties, dictionaries, regulations, webpages, the literature of a scientific topic, to name just a few. Still, what do we do to texts that are not written down or recorded in any other form? Think of folklore, legends, oral literature, etc. Thus, not everything that is written down is literature, and, conversely, literary pieces are not always written down. Evidently, this definition has to be narrowed down.

3. Voltaire’s definition: Literature is the collection of works that represent the values of humanity that have been developed through centuries. That is, literature means the “great books” of a culture, or of “civilised” humanity, or literature should be thought of as the representation of a particular culture, thus European literature should express the values that we accept as definitive. BUT: who decides? Voltaire may have referred to “the values of humanity” meaning the values of his own culture, thus universalising a concept that is more complex. Should we consider the folklore chants of an African tribe literature, part of the values of humanity? Or: only “the great books” count? This raises the problem of CANON. Originally, the canon meant the authorised or accepted list of books belonging to the Bible. Later the meaning changed and was applied to mean the accepted list of books attributed to a particular author (e.g., the

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Shakespeare canon) or the generally accepted list of works that are thought to make up a particular literature of a nation or a wider circle. The canon thus meant selection and exclusion (certain works were not considered to be part of a nation’s canon). The productions of certain minority groups in a society tend(ed) to be suppressed, forgotten or neglected, sometimes consciously, but more often, unconsciously. Think of African-American writers in the USA, women writers, gay fiction, postcolonial writers in the UK, “second-rate” writers, and so on. For instance everyone agrees that Jókai is a great figure of Hungarian literature, but would you consider Rejtő Jenő or Fejős Éva as part of “Hungarian Literature”? The example of Harry Potter is also exciting, see also the recent debate: János vitéz vs. Harry Potter, or the problems of canonisation surrounding the Hungarian writers Wass Albert or Nyírő József. The formation of canon is always an ideological or in the broad sense, “political” decision. The role of education is enormous – the schools tell us what is valuable, canonical and what is not. The canon always changes, certain “forgotten” voices keep being discovered and what once seemed canonical tends to be repressed or forgotten again.

4. Literature is a set of recorded texts of artistic quality. Or: Literature is the collection of aesthetically valuable, “beautiful” works. BUT: The question of “beauty” is an especially complicated issue; and a whole branch of study, aesthetics is concerned with it. The definition of literature as the carrier of beauty reflects an essentially Romantic definition of literature, in which the sole purpose of art should not primarily be moral/political/philosophical teaching but giving a sense of beauty (see Keats: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”, or Oscar Wilde’s famous definition: “The artist is a creator of beautiful things”). See also: the aesthetic movement. HOWEVER: Literature, especially in the 20th century is not necessarily beautiful. Who decides? The concept of beauty has been changing ever since art was born. In fact, today, the notion of “beauty” might suggest cheap, second-rate literature, as opposed to “élite” literature which are often disquieting, disturbing and abstract. And, not only literature as written text can give aesthetic pleasure. What about speeches? Slogans, commercials that contain rhymes? Jokes, puns? Lyrics? The Bible?

5. Literature cannot be seen as an abstract concept, it does not exist in itself. It is always the product of a given historical situation and social circumstances. Literature reflects, represents a given social and historical reality. In this sense, literature is a dialogue between the writer and the reader; the writer always knows for what kind of reader, in what kind of historical situation he/she writes and that determines the writing process. The theme, therefore, is embedded into its social background. BUT: Although this definition seems to go without saying, it seems to be obvious, but what shall we do with works which seem to be “out of” their social context? Think of works of modernism (Sartre’s definition is a reaction against the agenda of modernism.) Some writers never wrote about society, history or “reality” but about individual feelings, states of mind and so on. What happens if we simply cannot explain a work in its social context? Poetry is especially problematic in this sense. How can you explain William Carlos William’s poem entitled “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) (“so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the

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white / chickens.”) on the basis of some social or historical reality? Still more importantly, we arrive at the problem of representation (“ábrázolás”): portraying something by verbal or visual means. The idea of representation as “mirroring” goes back to Aristotle and is called MIMESIS (imitation). (1) Does literature imitate, reproduce, mirror the reality that is around us? In some sense yes, but total or exact imitation is never possible. Representations are never innocent, they never only “mirror” reality for two basic reasons: First, there is always something between the work of art and reality and that is language in the case of literature. The reality experience is filtered through language (not to mention the author’s consciousness) and so an exact reproduction of reality is never possible in art. Literature is always an artistic rendition of reality. (2) Secondly, works are influenced by a complex system of traditions, means, contexts, media, audience, intention, (hidden or open) ideologies, cultural factors, etc. Even a “simple” photograph that seems to recreate reality “as it is” has a secondary message about the subject, the object, intention, etc. Or even news, which should be the most objective items of information, carry hidden biases, on the basis of their selection and juxtaposition. So, representation cannot be absolutely free of mediation and ideology. (3) Thirdly, mimesis never means the reproduction of “reality”. As Aristotle already points out in Poetics, mimesis is only the imitation of probable or possible things and not “real” events or things. (For instance, it may occur in real life that Odysseus makes a journey home, but it did not necessarily happen in real life. On the other hand, it never happened that Dante descended to Hell with Virgil.) Thus, to raise the question of “truth” in literary works is meaningless, because they are not “true” in the conventional sense. An interesting question crops up in the case of historical novels: they mingle “real” events but render them in an imaginative way. So, they are “true” and “false” at the same time.

6. Literature is a set of works of imagination (literature as fiction). It is obvious that literary works speak about events and characters that did not happen (but could have) or who did not exist (but could have). BUT: what do we do with works of science fiction? Or ghost and horror stories? Again: what is the status of historical novels? They are seemingly about “true” events and “real” characters. What is more, what shall we do with autobiographies that still carry some artistic value?

7. Literature is a means of teaching, conveying moral truths. It was especially characteristic of the 18th-19th centuries that literature was thought of as a way of moral development. With its help, the reader can make a difference between binary oppositions (“asszimmetrikus ellenfogalmak”) such as normal ↔ deviant, true ↔ false, good ↔ bad, real ↔ fake, reality ↔ pretence, reality ↔ illusion, civilised ↔ primitive, valuable ↔ worthless, strong ↔ weak, masculine ↔ feminine, sense ↔ sensibility, rational ↔ emotional, mind ↔ body, writing ↔ speech, etc. Here we can see the importance of public education. – Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, one of the first literary theorists, also spoke about the effect tragedy has on the spectator. According to him, the main aim of tragedy is to induce catharsis, through the fall of the hero, which evokes “pity” and “fear” in the audience, and thus contributes to the moral development of the citizen. BUT: today we rarely expect literary pieces to

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(explicitly) teach us something, although they frequently give a kind of catharsis. Any work which tries to push through a message, a morale, some kind of teaching openly tends to raise our suspicions and we should always be critical of these pieces.

8. One thing is unquestionable, though. Literature works with language. It is a special way of using language. This seems to be a viable definition. How does literature use language, how does it modify it and what do we get from literature conceived of as a special way of using language? We’ll start from here in Chapter III.

II. APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

As it may have been obvious from the above, there are two principal ways we can approach literary works (Tzvetan Todorov calls these “functional” and “structural” approaches): in the first one, we examine the given literary work in its context (history, society, other contemporary literary works), while the second approach emphasises the existence of the work of literature in itself, torn out of context. The structural approach is looking for traits, rules or distinctive elements that define a text as literary.

If we look at the process of the production and consumption of literary works, we realize that there are four elements in the play:

The schools of literary criticism have been changing according to the shifts of emphasis that falls on these four elements.

1. The FORMALIST-STRUCURALIST view – the LITERARY WORK

The view that neither pays attention to the origins of the work, nor to the way it represents reality was born in the period of Modernism, in the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, this mode of criticism was in close connection with the art of Modernism itself that was born as a reaction to Positivism and Realism/Naturalism.

Modernist artists (from the period of the 1870s-80s, especially the so-called French Symbolists) maintained that the work of art has to be perfect in itself, it is a “verbal icon”, a self-enclosed unity that is independent of social, historical moral or biographical contexts. It

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THE WORLD

AUTHOR LITERARY WORK READER

does not teach, does not “express” anything about the author, it is significant because it exists as a work of art (Wallace Stevens: “A poem should not mean but be”). The origins go back to certain Romantic authors, such as E. A. Poe (“The Raven”), and was continued by the Pre-Raphaelite Movement in England and the aesthetic movement: the l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) idea may be familiar. The Modernists of the 1920s carried this idea to the peak, producing works that were subjective, concentrated on the psychological processes of characters and did not even attempt realism (perhaps “psychological realism”).

Correspondingly, literary criticism also tended to view the work of art as not a product of either social, historical, etc contexts, nor as that of the author’s psyche but as an autonomous, isolated system, that is absolutely independent of external circumstances. They concentrated only on the work, on how it fulfils the requirements of literariness. Two main “schools” evolved: the Anglo-American “New Criticism” and “Russian Formalism” (see above) – they were different in many respects but common in the sense of rejecting any reference outside the work. This school typically looks at the internal system of the texts, in the case of poetry, the tropes (metaphors, symbols, etc), use of sounds, rhyme patterns, meter, and so on, in the case of fiction, the recurring motifs, symbols, patterns, etc.

The formalist tendencies developed into Structuralism, an even more abstract school that wanted to create a “universal grammar” of literary works, sometimes with scientific means (statistics, computer programmes, linguistic analysis). But by the 1960s it was evident that such universal rules may not be laid down and structuralism slowly drew into the background. (It should not be thought, however, that such a structuralist analysis is necessarily boring, see for instance, Roland Barthes’s “S/Z” in which he analysis a short story by Balzac, sentence by sentence, in a really intriguing way.)

There are many sub-cases or ramifications of the formalist/ structuralist approach. First, we have to make a distinction between (1) the content of the work and (2) its structure, which are, by the way, never separable from each other.

The content-based criticism includes the following approaches and practices:

1. Thematic criticism: Thematic literary criticism is the study of literature categorized or classified by theme. It wants to concentrate on themes in one or several literary works and looks at these elements as they are repeated, varied and modified in the work. This theme can be a person, a living being, an object, an emotion, an event, a deed, etc. It aims to reveal the “thematic web” that structures the work of art. Themes may include, for instance, adultery, mental illnesses, jealousy, sexuality, treason, outsiders, in a particular or several authors’ works. Thematic criticism is a form of “archaeology” that excavates the layers of a text and compares that text with those found in other excavations: it is almost always comparative. A characteristic quotation from G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire (1949) serves to illustrate this point: “In [Shakespeare’s] Measure for Measure we have a careful dramatic pattern, a studied explication of a central theme: the moral nature of man in relation to the crudity of man's justice, especially in the matter of sexual vice. There is, too, a clear relation existing between the play and the Gospels, for the play's theme is this:

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Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7: 1-2)”

The point of the examination, then, will be to explore Shakespeare’s play from the point of view of judgment, morality and sexual vice.

2. Myth criticism: the method is basically similar, but this kind of criticism tries to identify the myths underlying the visible text. The text is viewed as a web of recurring mythical patterns, structures and timeless archetypes. A very important precedent was J. G. Frazer’s work of anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890), in which the author presents various customs and practices of “primitive” tribes as expressing notions of death, rebirth, and fertility. A more recent work is Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which Frye links the genres to various seasons and the seasonal cycle. This school is in connection with the anthropological theory and criticism, symbolism and Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. Myth-criticism is a valuable tool equipping the critic to deal with the literary practise of mythopoeia, or “myth-making.” The term mythopoeia lays emphasis on the artist’s appropriation of mythological elements (traditional or original) as an inherently creative act, an act of shaping. This kind of criticism reveals how the work (and the author) reshapes and activates the mythic patterns that are supposed to lie engraved in human existence, such as death, rebirth, resurrection, creation, rebellion, sacrifice, leaving home, homecoming, victimizing, scapegoating. For example, Hamlet may be interpreted as another version of the hero sacrificing himself for the community, Robinson Crusoe may be an example of the reworking of the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son (leaving home and homecoming), and creation also, while Lord of the Flies contains a host of archetypal patterns such as the Prometheus myth of inventing and stealing the fire, scapegoating and sacrifice. Some works explicitly use mythic patterns, for instance James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is a modern version of Odysseus’s travels.

3. Psycho-criticism (see below): approaching the work as a symptom, a dream text, and uncovering its meaning by digging deeper and deeper in the meaning of symbols like a psychoanalyst.

Structural criticism examines, of course, the form and the structure of the work and how they contribute to the meaning of the work. It includes the areas of poetics, rhetoric, stylistics and genre theory. We should never forget that a “formal” feature (for example a particular rhyme or sound pattern or the structure of a novel) always serves the expression of some meaning, it is never a “decoration” that the work can be stripped of and it still means the same.

2. The EXPRESSIVE view – the AUTHOR

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If we concentrate on interpretation from the aspect of the author, and the genesis of the work of art, several approaches may be distinguished. Typical questions that come up in this instances are the following: What did the author want to express with this? What personal trait of the author is reflected in the work of art? What elements in his/her life, personality development, family and social background are reflected in the work? Is the work the expression of some repressed feeling? What social, historical and cultural circumstances influenced the birth of the work? How is the work part of larger, broader artistic trends? As you can see, some of the questions centre around the author himself or herself, and some of them refer to the circumstances of the birth of the literary work. Let us see the questions separately:

1. “What did the author want to express with this?” – Intentional criticism is a mode of investigation that tries to discover the intentions of the author behind the work (“With this poem the poet wants to say that…”). The idea goes back to 19th-century Romanticism.

It was in the Romantic period that art came to regarded as not primarily a means of imitation or moral teaching but as the expression of the author’ creative genius. This is the age of heightened individualism, an immense faith in honest self-expression, good and improvable characters.

The idea also goes back to Plato who claimed that true insight and inspiration can only be achieved through “divine madness”, the poet being possessed by the Muses. Hence the idea that the poet is somebody exceptional, above average people, somebody “chosen”, not bound by the rules of everyday life. The nineteenth century is also the era of heroism, individual great deeds, almost all Romantic poets and writers had a faith in “great men” who are able to transform history (see Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, 1846). The Romantic poet also believed in the power of symbol in poetry, he said it is an epiphanic (revelatory) representation of the eternal (divine or ideal) through the temporal (actual, real). (see for instance, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, or Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”)

Although in the Modernist period (1890s-1930s) the expressive view of literature seems to fade away (it was – and is – more and more difficult to make authentic statements, subjectivity is gradually falling into pieces), the idea lived on in Expressionism (Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele).

Today trying to guess what the author “might have had in mind” when writing the work is regarded as an outdated and insufficient way of criticising works, see Wimsatt and Bearsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), who claim – and this is also a Modernist idea – that after the work is born, the author has nothing to do with it, the work begins to live an autonomous life. The explanation is that since about the end of the 19th century, there is less and less confidence in an autonomous and integral human being who “expresses” his or her thoughts and emotions in a “direct” way. Almost always, the speaker in the poem and the narrator of the novel or short story are not identical with each other. Therefore, to ask “what the author thought of” is meaningless because it is not he/she who speaks but the characters or the “voice” in the poem. (See also: Arany János: “gondolta a fene!”)

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2. “What personal trait of the author is reflected in the work of art? What elements in his/her life, personality development, family and social background are reflected in the work?” – The same problem. Although it is undeniable that the artist’s life is important and some events in that life or personal background are “reflected” in the work, but to say that it gives explanation to the work is a fallacious idea. For instance, several pieces are motivated by autobiographical elements. For example, it is useful to know that Móricz Zsigmond attended the Debrecen College and Légy jó mindhalálig is autobiographical, describing similar experiences, but it does not mean that his experiences led directly to the birth of the work or that the work is the direct reflection of these experiences; the novel is much richer than that. Or, we know that Charlotte Brontë was a governess and that Jane Eyre is also a governess in the novel, but it is not the life story of the author. Or, it is difficult to understand József Attila’s poems without knowing some events of his life (the figure of the mother, the area where they lived, his political ideas), but the examination of the poems must go beyond that. Examining the life of the poet/author is not a mistake in itself, but it should not be assumed that certain experiences “directly” “create” or “determine” certain parts of the literary work. (See also: “a költőnek hányatott gyerekkora volt”)

3. “Is the work the expression of some repressed feeling?” – Psychoanalytic criticism: Due to the pioneering thoughts of the Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud (1865-1939), our whole concept of the mind has changed. These thoughts also appeared in literary criticism, mainly in four forms.

(1) The earliest attempts tried to understand the work as the product of the different psychological processes taking place in the author (repression, fantasy, repressed contents in dreams, forbidden sexuality, etc) – this is the subject of Freud’s essays, “The Poet and the Workings of Fantasy”, “Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence” and “The Moses of Michelangelo”. It is, for instance, popular to interpret Dickens’s works based on the childhood trauma he suffered when he was sent to work in a factory. Or think of József Attila’s relationship with his mother and the absence of the father figure.

(2) The other kind of psychoanalytic criticism seeks to discover the characters’ intentions and motivations from a psychological aspect, see Freud, “The Uncanny” (about E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman”). Several studies, for example, were written about Hamlet’s psychological problems and his assumed mother-complex. Nowadays, although they may have some legitimacy, these approaches seem to be too mechanical and simplistic, what is more, they may lead to overinterpretation, in which every person or object may have some “repressed” or sexual meaning, but as Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.

(3) The third mode of psychocriticism concentrates on the psychology of reading (reception). It seeks the ways in which certain fantasies and desires of the reader are activated in the reading process (for instance voyeurism, see Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response).

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(4) The last mode of understanding is concentrating on how the text itself works in a psychoanalytic way, how it tries to repress, or hide something from the reader, through what mechanisms it works (condensation, transference, translation), that is, the text is read as a fantasy text, a “dream”, which needs additional interpretation. The idea is that behind the visible work, there is a “hidden” work, which needs to be uncovered by the critic working as a sort of detective, looking for traces and symptoms.

This dilemma of the work being determined by the author leads us to the idea of Positivism:

4. “What social, historical and cultural circumstances influenced the birth of the work? How is the work part of larger, broader artistic trends?” – Positivist criticism.

The main idea of 19th-century (especially post-Romantic) criticism is that any human product, and also different phenomena of the world may be understood if we examine how they came about, how they were born and what their origin and history is. The best example for this is Darwinian science, which understands the present state of the biological world based on its origins and subsequent development, paying attention to the “gaps”, extinct species as well (see also: natural selection, the survival of the fittest, struggle for live, etc). Basically, Marx’s idea of the society is similar, that is, he conceives of history as the history of class struggle, that is directed towards an ideal end-point, the birth of communism. The idea also appeared in linguistics, this is the age when historical linguistics is born, that is, languages are compared and traced back to some common origin, instead of a static view of systems.

Positivism was originally a philosophical aspect of this thought that wanted to eliminate all kinds of subjective or transcendental elements from scientific examination and concentrated only on verifiable, “positive” facts (the name comes from August Comte). It was the French scholar Hypollite Taine who applied the same idea on the study of literature, claiming that the work may be understood if we examine its historical, social, political and biographical circumstances, claiming the work is a direct product of these circumstances. (Even in today’s public education this is the most popular mode of analysing works of literature.) Naturally, it is not wrong to examine the historical, social, or political circumstances of the birth of a literary work, but to assume that the novel or the poem mirrors these circumstances is extremely reductive, since it reduces the work to the status of a “mirror” of contemporary reality.

4. The PRAGMATIC approach – the READER

Since the Renaissance, mimesis was combined with a pragmatic (practical) orientation that sees the work of art as an instrument to teach the public morally and delight it through its sense of the pleasant and the beautiful.

The idea, like so many others in criticism, goes back to the Antiquity. Horace claimed that “The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life.” (see also Aristotle’s idea of catharsis, the “purgation” of the soul).

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Sir Philip Sidney, the English Renaissance poet claimed that poetry is speaking in pictures (“ut pictura poesis”), which also goes back to Horace’s idea of teaching and delighting, conceiving of the literary work as “dulce et utile”, “sweet and useful”. This concept culminates in the neo-classical literature of the 18th century.

Beginning in the 19th century, however, scepticism grew as far as the didactic (teaching) function of literature was concerned (see Romanticism and Modernism), simply because there was no common platform anymore on which this didactic function could be based, the poet/author did not feel “entitled” to teach anything to the audience (at least in a direct form). The worst form of didacticism appears in works of propaganda in the 20th century.

Somewhat independently of these developments, when in the 1960s it could be felt that the achievements of Structuralism could not be continued, a new critical school appeared in the 1970s that called itself “Reader Response Criticism” and suddenly “discovered” that the work also has a reader. It tried to examine the work from the point of view of its reception, the effect it has on the reader, from various psychological and social perspectives. For instance looking at the ways the interpretation of the work depends on the psyche of the reader (using psychoanalysis), how the reader himself/herself also “creates” the work of art together with the author, etc. But since every reading experience is different, the foundation of these ideas turned to be shaky and too subjective.

Representatives: Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? (1980); Michael Riffaterre, Text Production (1983)

4. The MIMETIC view – the WORLD

The mimetic view (mimesis = imitation, representation) is the most persistent and oldest idea about the function of literature and art in general. According to this idea, the literary work is “the imitation of reality.” The work of art is secondary, it is a “copy” of “reality”.

The idea goes back as far as the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Plato maintained in his work “The Republic” that since artists “only” imitate reality, their existence and function is useless in an ideal state. What is more, he says that reality is already a copy, an imitation of an ideal world – see the “cave metaphor” in Book 7 of “The Republic”. What we perceive are only shadows of ideas, the things are only copies of their idea (a table is a shadow of “the idea of a table”, and so on). So, artists make, in fact, copies of copies.

Aristotle, Plato’s student had a different opinion, in “Poetics” he claimed that poetry is a superior form of the acquisition of knowledge than history, because history expresses the particular and talks about what happened, while poetry/drama expresses the universal and is about what could have happened. According to Aristotle, art is mimetic, it represents reality in several ways: with the help of sounds in music, with the help of movements in dance, with the help of music and speech in poetry and drama. Literature can take three forms: history (in which there is one narrator), drama (in which only the characters speak) and epic (the mixture of the two).

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The idea of mimesis took deep roots in European culture from the Middle Ages on, especially in England from the time of the Renaissance, due to the empirical critical thinking of English scholars. It continued to survive in the time of Romanticism as well, but towards the end of the 19th century, the idea began to decline and art was less and less considered as a means of “imitating” reality.

During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, later in Romanticism, Nature became a norm to follow. In the former two periods, authors concentrated on a best possible descriptions of human nature (Shakespeare, see Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”), while Romantic poets were interested in Nature outside humans as a source of inspiration.

Corresponding schools of criticism: Marxist criticism.

Representatives: Lukács György, A regény elmélete (1975), Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)

Finally, we might summarise the above ideas in the same chart as in the beginning:

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MIMESIS

EXPRESSIONOBJECT AS FORM/STRUCTURE

PRAGMATIC GOAL / RESPONSE

genesis reception

III. LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

Literature is evidently determined by its medium, language. In everyday life we use different registers, ways of speaking/writing that has an effect on word choice, sentence structure, cohesion, and so on. These can be:

- Scientific: clear, transparent, referential, exact use of language, where every word has (should have) a clear meaning and is directly related to the concept it signifies. There is theoretically no chance of misunderstanding here. If I say “hydrocarbons”, I refer to a definite set of organic compounds in chemistry, if I say “Doppler effect”, I refer to a specific effect in physics and nothing else. This is called the DENOTATIVE use of language. Denotation is the primary meaning of a word.

- Artistic: an opaque, hazy, not exact use of language, where words and expressions have a double meaning, they suggest multiple or further associations. This language is full of ambiguity and that is its purpose. When the artist refers to a black crow, it is obviously not only a black crow, but also “means” the poet’s sadness, tragedy, death, evil, and so on, depending on the most probable interpretation. This is called the CONNOTATIVE use of language (con + notatio – meaning together). (See the difference between walking and dancing or window and stained-glass window.)

- Everyday language: is somewhere between the two; our primary aim is to communicate effectively, making use of the denotative aspect of language, but we also use a lot of artistic expressions (idioms, puns, jokes), especially in the slang register of the language that makes our way of speaking or writing more visual, more expressive.

What makes literary language? (Saussure, Jakobson, Shklovsky, Barthes)

The systematic study of literary language began at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries from a linguistic point of view.

The founder of modern linguistics is generally regarded to be Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist. At the time he began his career, the study of language primarily meant the study of the history of language, something we call diachronic linguistics. (Diachronic = through time). Saussure also began his work with comparative Indo-germanic linguistics, but turned towards the synchronic (= with time) study of language that did not want to see language in its development, but to study it in its contemporary, actual form. He made a difference between the two forms and said, language is a system and a practical application at the same time. He termed language as application, as actual, changing use

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PAROLE, and language as an unchanging system LANGUE, and that’s what he wanted to study.

LANGUE is a set of objective rules, a system shared by all users, it is public. (Like the rules of a game.)

PAROLE is private, it is the individual, concrete utterance. (Like the game itself.)

He realised that language is based on SIGNS. A sign is made up of two elements: the signified and the signifier. The SIGNIFIER is the sequence of graphic or vocal marks (letters or sounds), the SIGNIFIED is the concept to which it refers. Saussure claimed that there is no natural connection between the two, the relationship between them is completely arbitrary. For instance there is no reason why we should call the part of the body that has fingers on it “hand” and not “hund” or “band”. Or in the case of colours: why do we call a particular colour pink or green? Saussure claimed that signs are unmotivated.

In a more abstract way: there is no connection between the material world and language. Thus he solved the philosophical question whether the words we use somehow “contain” the world we refer to or not. (Do we call something X, because there is something “X” in it, or vice versa.) In Saussure’s theory, it is the words that determine the meaning of things. Onomatopoeic (“hangutánzó”) words may be exceptions, where the “thing” determines the “word” but these words are only similar to the actual sounds they describe.

What makes meaning in language, then, if the words do not give back the meaning of things? According to Saussure, it is the difference and relationships between signs that counts. For instance: the sign “hand” can only get its meaning because it is tacitly agreed that it’s not “band”, nor “land”, nor “wand”. The difference between the “h”, “b”, “l” and “w” phonemes make it possible to identify “hand” as a sign referring to something. Also: it’s a great difference if I say, “the page of the book” or “the book of the page”.

How does all this pertain to the study of literature? If we say that the individual works of art constitute the Saussurean PAROLE then there must be a general system, a LANGUE that governs all these “utterances”. The so-called Russian Formalists (Propp, Shklovky, Tomashevsky) and the Structuralists (Roman Jakobson, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes) all claimed the “literariness” may be detected in a general system of rules of literature.

On the other hand, the Saussurean idea had an effect on the study of the language of literature as well. Roland Barthes (1915-80), a French scholar, claimed, following Saussure, that language is a system of signs. A sign can be a symbol, can be part of a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic system.

The sign as a SYMBOL is regarded as something that has some sort of (arbitrary) meaning. If we take the example of the traffic light, the colour “red” means you have to stop, “green” means you can go.

A paradigmatic system means “based on selection”. If a sign is part of a PARADIGMATIC system, it also means that it does not mean something else (see the examples with “hand”). So

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the colour “red” as a symbol only gains its meaning if we know that “green” means juts the opposite. The colour “red” gains its meaning from what it is not.

A syntagmatic system means “based on combination”. If a sign is also part of a SYNTAGMATIC system it gains its meaning from its “neighbours” and how we combine it with them. For instance in the traffic light example, we know that if “red” and “yellow” appear together, it means “soon you can go”, whereas if “yellow” stands alone, it means “soon you have to stop” (or if the yellow light keeps flashing, the lights do not work).

Literary language, then, is the special selection and combination of signs with arbitrary meanings. Roman Jakobson (1886-1982), a Russian linguist claimed (especially in his study “Linguistics and Poetics”) that literary language works on two different “axes”, those of selection and combination. When we construct a text, we make a selection from the available linguistic items (synonyms), for instance we may speak about a boy, a lad, a guy, a bloke, a young man, a chap, a young gentleman, etc, depending on the context and the message (paradigmatic relationship). Jakobson maintains that poetic language depends on the special combination (syntagmatic relationship) of signs: “the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination”.

What does this mean? Jakobson argues that when conveying a perfectly everyday sentence, we select signs from among the available set of synonyms and we combine them. For example: “The child is sleeping.” We have to elements here: child + sleep. We can replace both of them with synonyms that each carry a slightly different meaning. For instance you could replace “child” with “kid”, “youngster”, “baby”, “infant”, “toddler” “tot”, “minor” and so on; similarly “sleep” is more or less equivalent with “doze”, “nod”, “nap” “slumber”, “rest”, etc. What precisely distinguishes poetry in general from other verbal messages is the predominance of the poetic function. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature (e.g. prose narrative) is that, in Jakobson’s famous formula, the “poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (39).When combining these words in poetry, we change the meaning of equivalence (a vertical concept) and project it onto the horizontal axis of combination. So combination is not simply putting elements next to each other, but the principle of equivalence should also work on this axis as well. This equivalence manifests itself in two principal ways: in terms of prosody (metre) and sound (rhyme), so not only words but syllables, stressed and unstressed words and syllables and feet (verslábak) behave in the same way. The point is that in the case of poetic language denotation is seen as secondary and the reader realises that beyond the pure meaning of the word combinations “there is something more,” because the synatgmatic combination that is innocent, functional, simple in real life now is seen as showing itself, calling attention to itself. The case is similar as in stained glass windows in churches: they are not simply transparent windows, they call attention to themselves by their colour and opacity. Take the first line of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”: “The sea is calm tonight.” The regular rhythm and the equivalence of stressed and unstressed syllables suggest the calmness of the sea. The poetic function would disappear if we read: “Tonight there is no wind on the sea.” To take a Hungarian example: Petőfi’s line “Még nyílnak a völgyben a kerti virágok” gains its power

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from its rhythm and not from the mere words. Or József Attila’s line “Én ámulok / hogy elmulok” is infinitely more dramatic than “Furcsa, hogy mindenkinek meg kell halni.”

The poetic function, however, is not limited to poetry alone. Jakobson mentions that not only in poetry, but in everyday language, for instance in slogans, we might encounter such strange combinations. His example is “I like Ike”, which was a political slogan supporting President Eisenhower. It would be absolutely inefficient if it was “I like Eisenhower” – “I like Ike” gives it a poetic quality and appeals more to the senses. Or Julius Caesar’s famous saying “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I won”) gets it appeal from the three monosyllabic words beginning with the sound “v” and ending with “i”. You can find countless other examples in commercials, lyrics, and slang expressions. What is more, in everyday speech we also use – unconsciously – this poetic function. You may have recognised that certain word combinations “sound” better than if we changed the word order, even though they would mean the same. Jakobson’s example is “Joan and Margery.” It is certainly more pleasant to hear that “Margery and Joan” and this is because in the first case, the repetition of feet and sounds is more balanced (essentially a trochee and a dactyl: – u – uu) instead of a rough combination of one stressed, three unstressed and one stressed syllable (“Margery and Joan”). Or let’s look at proverbs: both the Hungarian proverb “Jobb ma egy veréb, mint holnap egy túzok” and its English counterpart “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” gain their “artistic” quality from the regularity of their rhythm and number of syllables.

The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky also concentrated on the nature of literary language and the way it violates the norms of “normal” utterances. These deviations can be made in two ways: with a set of verbal devices (rhyme, meter, tropes) and with the device that Shklovsky defines as “defamiliarisation” (ostranenie): “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of the object; the object is not important… to make the stone ‘stony’”. Examples: Hamlet swears that he’ll take revenge on his father’s murderer: I'll wipe away all trivial fond records / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past... / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter. (I.5.99-104). Christopher Isherwood begins his novel Goodbye to Berlin like this: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”. Here we must talk about dead metaphors, that is, expressions that used to be metaphors but we have forgotten about them as such. For example, if I say, “the leg of the char has broken”, I don’t even realise I’m using a metaphor, because it has become part of everyday speech. These do not have any function in poetic texts, a poetic metaphor must be stunning, surprising, must show a new perspective on the thing (but there is also a danger that a metaphor or simile becomes ridiculous).

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IV. ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE FICTION

1. WHAT: PLOT AND STORY

(A, ) Plot / Story

Story (action)= sequence of events, just a listing of action-elements.

Plot= a series of actions designed, shaped, including cause- and – effect relationships, motivation etc.

Story: The King died and then the Queen died.

Plot: The King died and then the Queen died in grief.

Aristotle: Plot (mythos) is action (praxis) arranged artistically.

Russian formalist terms: Sujet (szüzsé) = plot ------------ Fabula = story

There are three main differences between the FABULA (STORY, the time of narration) and the SUJET (PLOT, narrated time):

1. order: in the story, events take place one after the other. In the plot, this order may be broken and one event may be presented earlier, although it happened later.

2. frequency: in the story, events take place only once. In the plot, this one event may be repeated, may be presented several times if it’s particularly important.

3. duration: In the plot, the treatment of events does not coincide with “real time”. For instance, a five-minute event may be presented by the author through 50 pages, if these 5 minutes are very important. A period like hundreds of years, however, may be skipped or summarised in two pages. It may also happen that almost nothing takes place in “real time”, and we can only hear the narrator speaking. However, the opposite may also be true, that is, we feel that something happened, only the narrator does not speak about it, thus contributes to suspense and uncertainty.

(B,) Plot structure (ideal)

1. exposition : provides general background information about time, place, characters. This is typical in 19th- century novels, e.g. in the introduction, every single information is given about the circumstances, etc. ( for instance in Balzac’s Père Goriot) The opposite of this is the “in medias res” beginning (“in the middle of things”)

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2. conflict : this is not necessarily a particular sentence or passage, it’s all hidden there from the beginning, it’s the fact that there’re opposing forces everywhere.

Conflicts can exist between:

- characters

- groups of characters

- character – society ( Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1895), Stendhal: Red and Black, Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, etc.)

- character – natural forces ( Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea)

- within characters (Dickens: Great Expectations, James Joyce, “Araby”, and in fact it’s difficult to mention any quality piece of literature where there is not a conflict within the main character at least)

3. crisis : the moment of the conflicting forces are activated ( for instance in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley, or Darcy’s confession)

4. climax : the point of highest intensity – there can be more than one climax in the work

anticlimax: - typical of postmodern texts or comic texts (we expect something great and we get something insignificant, banal, which leads to a comic or sometimes tragic effect)

5. resolution : (“denouement”, in French: untying the knot): the plot calms down, problems are solved, the plot reaches a kind of solution (which is not always happy, especially from the time of the Modernist novel [1880s, 1890s])

Other parts of the plot structure

1. Framing or embedding

a, Chinese box type (Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights)

There is a narrator (or narratorial voice) that introduces Lockwood, the naïve narrator, who, because of his naivity, enquires for information from Nellie, the housekeeper, thus we get more and more “inside” the plot and past events.

b. Decameron type ( Chaucer, Canterbury Tales)

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There is a framework situation that gives the chance to the characters to tell stories. In the case of Canterbury Tales (written around 1385), this is a pilgrimage, where the pilgrims entertain each other with telling stories. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, this is an epidemic that breaks out in the city, so the young men and women leave the place, go to the countryside and also pass the time telling stories to each other.

c. Don Quixote type – The characters set out on a journey, meet certain characters and they tell stories to them.

2. In medias res beginning

3. Playing with time

a. Foreshadowing = letting the reader know or at least give an implication of what is going to happen: „on the day, he was killed, Santiago Nazar got up at half past five in the morning” (Borges), the opening of the film American Beauty, Chekhov: “The gun on the wall” theory: if there is a gun on the wall in the first act, it is going to fired in the fifth.

b. Flashback: jumping back to an earlier point, especially after an in medias res beginning.

c. Delay: before the most exciting moment there’s another episode (esp. in detective stories or thrillers)

Theories about a good plot

Aristotle: - Unity / Wholeness / Magnitude

about classical Greek drama in “Poetics”

1. Unity: only ONE action, one plot line should be represented (no sub-plots or deviations). If we take one part out, the whole action should fall apart -> it follows that no unnecessary elements should be included in the play.

2. Wholeness: this has to be one COMPLETE action, it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and cause-and-effect relationships between them.

3. Magnitude: the story must be long enough to allow a change of fortune (incident)

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Episodes leading to tragedy:

1. Peripeteia: reversal, a turn of events from good to bad. It is a scene of the realization of some unexpected truth, suddenly the hero begins to see things from another angle, e.g. in Antigone by Sophocles, Creon realises his mistake and is rushing to the cave to free Antigone. Peripeteaia can be preceeded by two things: some great error (hamartia) or a frailty of character, such as extreme pride (hubris).

2. Anagnorisis: the protagonist recognises his guilt, “a change from ignorance to knowledge”, e.g., Creon, after listening to the blind sage, recognises that he was to blame.

3. Pathos: suffering after the recognition (in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus blinds himself, after realising he has married his own mother).

(C,) The „decline” of storytelling

Classical storytelling: teleological: that is, , moving towards a telos, a great end that has some final reason. E.g. the Bible: the final cause/meaning of earthy existence. Most of the great 19th century novels end with a “great” conclusion (death or marriage).

Modernism: the whole theory of moving towards a great end that offers solutions for everything is questioned, scepticism towards “great” conclusions: no fast moving plot, no story to talk about, very little happens – modernist novels usually include one day or even less. ( Golding’s Pincher Martin is about just a few minutes.)

Reasons:

1. artistic: high culture ↔ low culture

The “story” is sometimes considered to be old-fashioned, dated, obsolete, belonging to low culture. (E.g.: Danielle Steele novels or Nora Roberts’s novels: full of exciting action, very little to think about)

2. mimetic: The realisation that life is not like art, life does not offer plots, hasn’t got real stories. It is the artists who create the „raw material” of life into art, e.g. a compulsion of American films/novels to have happy endings. Life simply does not work like this, therefore such a representation would falsify the true nature of life.

3. philosophical: The end of meta-narratives (the stories that claim to reveal the meaning of other stories) or grand narratives (the meaning of other great stories) that provide the full explanation of something. This can be the Bible, or a history of a nation, a history of one national literature, a general theory of history, literature, etc. characterized by the belief in telos.

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Hegel: History is based on dialectics (thesis – antithesis - synthesis), or Marx: history is the history of class struggles.

Today: no such “great” narratives that define everything (everybody would be – or should be – suspicious of them) E.g. Szegedy-Maszák Mihály: A magyar irodalom történetei (a history of Hungarian literature published in 2007): several “stories” of Hungarian literature exist next to each other.

J. P. Lyotard: postmodernism= incredulity ( scepticism) towards metanarratives: “The narrative function is losing (its functions) its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal”. („little narratives”)

(D,) The study of narrative

Narratology – Structuralism (1950s-1960s)

Narratology claims that narration is universal, it is a set of rules, independent of the material. A belief that a general structure and rules that’s valid for all narrative can be found without ambiguity.

Roland Barthes: „ a narrative is a long sentence just as every constative (affirmative) sentence is in a way a rough outline of a short narrative.”. If narrative (for example a novel or a short story) is a long sentence, it can be treated according to the rules of grammar, can be dissected into smaller parts and can be analysed (which Barthes does in his S/Z, published in 1972, in which he analyses Balzac’s “Sarrasine” sentence by sentence).

The „grammar” of stories

The narrative may be treated as a sign:

STORY → DISCOURSE(histoire)

jelölt(récit)jelölő

what excist outside the page, the mental image, the idea of the

signifier

physical markshow the story is organized,

what’s on the pageTHE WHAT THE HOWSIGNIFIED SIGNIFIER

deep structure surface structureCompetence

all the possible sentences (stories)

narratives we can build, all deep in our brain/culture

performance

actualizatonrealization

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Vladimir Propp (1895-1970): analysed Russian folk tales, elements of folk tales and discovered all possible 24 combinations.

“The dragon kidnapped the king’s daughter.”

The dragon kidnapped the king’s daughter.monsterenemy

burnedpoisoned

emperorGod

treasurelife

HOSTILE character

DOING sg. BAD

AUTHORITY VALUE

Propp identified “Characters” and “Functions”

(7) Roles- hero, figure of power, enemy, helper ….

(31) Functions- doing damage, departure, setting up a taboo, violating a taboo

But Propp analysed only Russian folk tales: what about novels?

It’s questionable whether we can set up a similar „grammar” for complex stories or that a “general grammar” of all narratives can ever be laid down.

2. WHO: THE CHARACTER

1. The difference between personality and character

character: the contextual knowledge, what the author lets us see, created by the text in various ways, what the others know of us (for instance, the reader is only informed that Peter is afraid of birds – that’s the surface).

personality: the „real” character what’s “inside”. We have to understand the text to discover the character’s motivations, what’s inside him/her (we get to know that Peter had unpleasant experiences in his childhood and somehow he has connected his fears with birds – that’s the “depth” of Peter’s personality).

Great characters are lifelike, true to our experiences, we can easily imagine them and we can identify with them. They’re more or less coherent, plausible, etc.

The formation of personality is based on two assumptions:

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- liberal humanist ideology: respects individually and autonomy, the character is not a type, can’t be repeated. Born in the 18th century as a figure (Robinson)

- there’s a universal human essence: that’s there in everyone hidden, we’re basically all the same, characters can be boxed into types, representatives of sg. else, sg. external. E.g. the theory of humours in the Middle Ages: there are sanguinic, melancholic, phlegmatic and choleric types of people.

Personality is somewhere between the universal and particular.

2. Types of characters :

a, protagonist – neutral term, passes no value judgement, simply the main, central character, can be heroic, wicked or average…

b, antagonist – a minor character – no value judgment, simply tries to defy the protagonist, prevent him from doing sg.

c, villain – a very bad, evil antagonist, think of Richard III., Hannibal Lecter. Usually found in adventure or romantic stories, tales.

d, hero – heroine – if the protagonist is heroic, but the hero is not necessarily the protagonist.

e, antihero – non-heroic, but not evil: an ordinary person who is not able to control his life, powerless, helpless, unheroic. Usually in 19-20th c. fiction: the chinovnik type of character (insignificant office workers in Gogol or Chekhov), Kafka’s characters, Samuel Beckett (pathetic, miserable characters both in his plays and novels), Woody Allen’s films, Pierre Richard or just think of the Hungarian film Üvegtigris – all the characters are antiheroes.

3. Character – Characterization

The character created by the story, whereas characterization is done by the text.

Types of characters:

a, Flat characters – one dominant feature

- allegorical figures in Christian morality plays (Middle Ages) - Sin, Good Deeds, etc.

- caricatures – one feature exaggerated → comedy

- popular fiction – „the” action hero, who always wins, “the” victim, etc.

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- representative of certain times

1. psychological – the villain

2. social – the American money maker

3. national types – the national hero

- stock characters

1. always the same, „on stock”

2. comedia dell’arte (a type of comedy that evolved in Italy, in the mid-16th century)– jealous husband, shrewd servant, lecherous lawyer, etc

3. Brazilian soap operas

These are static characters, that is, they never change.

b, Round characters – more than one character feature, many dimensional, full, motivated.

They are dynamic, they change in the story (for the better or for the worse).

4. Reading characters

- while reading we process information about references to the character

- we have models based on previous literary experiences and we try to “recognize” the characters.

- phenomena → the essence of personality

motivation …………………………………. surface → character

„ motivation” ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

depth, core → personality

We try to enter the character’s depth and decipher his/her motivation.

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5. Characterization – done by the text

a, direct, block (Balzac, Pere Goriot, p.17)

- it’s all there in one passage

- narrator offers us all the necessary information in one single paragraph

b, indirect characterisation

This can happen: through

-action

-speech – style, vocabulary, dialect, word-choice (Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the regional novel, “local colour”)

-external appearance → stereotypes are created: e.g. a fat character is usually jovial, happy, while a read-haired character or a person with physical disfigurement denotes an evil personality

-setting (milieu) e.g.: a room one inhabits may tell a lot about the personality (reflects the idea of positivism, see later)

-names – telling names

- allegorical figures: the name is their essence (a character names Sin embodies nothing else than sin)

- Biblical/mythological models: for instance: Steven Daedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) obviously refers to the Greek mythological figure Daedalus. Abel Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations has connotations with the Biblical name Abel and also with “witch”. A girl named Estella, also in Great Expectations, means “star” that the protagonist is not able to reach. (Dickens always used a lot of telling names).

- ironic – telling names can be ironic, too, because there’s not much angelic in Angel Clare in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

- names can simply denote an important feature: Robinson Crusoe’s name denotes that he’s a son (which is important because he rebels against his father) and that he sets out on a cruise landing on a desert island. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde point to the fact that within the same man there’s a character that destroys himself (kill) and one evil that hides in him (hide).

6.The disappearance of character in 20 th -century fiction

- the crisis of liberal humanist ideology

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- faceless, unheroic heroes/characters (go back to Gogol, Chekhov, Kafka)

- gradual loss of personality

- Nathalie Sarraute (French writer and theorist): we’re not “agents” but “patients”

3. WHERE: THE SETTING

Functions:

a, reality effect: creates verisimilitude, the reader begins to build a world of reality imagining the place. The role of adjectives is great in this case.

A special case: “colour locale” (local colour) → evokes associations about a given region or country. E.g. a film that takes place in a desert would surely show some palm trees, camels. When we glimpse pyramids, it is for sure that we are in Egypt. An American locale is described by sky-scrapers or the Grand Canyon, etc. These (palm trees, pyramids, skyscrapers) are synechdochic references (the part stands for the whole), also called icons representing an abstract idea).

The colour locale may also be provided by a certain way of speech, dialects, local customs, etc. This is especially typical of the so-called regional novel. Main representatives: Thomas Hardy (writing about an imaginary region that he called Wessex, in reality Dorset), Arnold Bennett (the Potteries region of England), D.H. Lawrence, Maria Edgeworth

The theory that the environment may determine the character and that the place reflects the character’s mind, occupation, social status, etc. goes back to the idea of Positivism, popular in the second half of the 19th century. (August Comte, Hyppolite Taine). Positivism, as a science, wants to rely on “positive” (hard) facts as opposed to the speculation of metaphysics. It wants to trace the origins of the phenomena of life (a certain way of behaviour, or a literary work), thus also shows parallels with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Both claim that the origins determine the present state of things (determinism).

Thus, Positivism claims that the human personality depends on 3 factors:

- milieu (environment)

- moment (a given historical era)

- race (genetic features)

These determine a character’s behaviour and personality.

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b, places having symbolic function

The setting may not only create the sense of verisimilitude, but can also have symbolic functions. For instance, caves, deep forests, labyrinths, gardens (referring to the garden of Eden) trees, houses often indicate some inner, mental place within the character.

c, atmosphere

The setting also creates a suitable atmosphere for the text. The changes of the weather, the look of the landscape often reflect the mood of narration. This was called “Pathetic fallacy” by John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic: he said it is the erroneous belief that nature reflects our emotions: it rains because we’re sad, it shines because we’re happy and not the other way round. This was basically a critique of the Romantic concept of art according to which the human soul and Nature must live in harmony and should reflect each other.

d, experimental function

Some novels exaggerate description, which is so detailed and realistic that is becomes surrealistic. Behind this is the belief that language is not appropriate to describe the world appropriately (characteristic of the so-called nouveau roman, “new novel” in French, popular in the 1950s-1960s) Alain Robbe-Grillet (a nouveau roman writer):

“The world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It simply is.”

4. WHEN: TIME AND NARRATIVE

1. Narrative is the primary means to make time meaningful (we can only feel the passage of time if something happens to us or something changes around us and we also narrate it). On the other hand, all narratives necessarily contain some sort of theory/view of time. So time and narrative mutually presuppose each other.

2. The kind of time usually reflected in narratives is linear. That is, it progresses, moves forward, from the past to the future. Realist narratives contain this kind of linear time.

3. The sense of time treated in narratives can also be cyclical → This frequently appears in rural fictions, where the change of seasons has a mythic/symbolic meanings, in folk

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tales, family sagas (story of generations), implying a spiral: the fortune of the family is getting higher or lower.

4. In some experimental writings, time can even be forking, that is, from one point two stories take place at the same time. (see Jorge Luis Borges: “The Garden of Forking Paths”, or the German film Lola Rennt [A lé meg a Lola])

5. Time can, in a certain sense, be eternal, ending in endless repetition, creating the sense of absurdity (Beckett, existentialism in general). This is not cyclical time, where there is always some kind of change compared to the previous cycle, here everything remains the same.

6. In Modernist fiction (from 1890s to 1930s): we can se a key distinction between:

- objective time (clock time) – quantitative – all seconds are of equal value.

- subjective (felt time) – qualitative, some moments have a privileged, position. Henri Bergson called this DURÉE RÉELLE (real duration)

7. Organizing time in narrative (see the differences between plot and story):

- frequency

- order → gives rhythm to the story

- duration

8. Erzählzeit → the time in which the narrator tells the story, narrating time. Erzählte Zeit → the time about which the narrator tells the story, narrated time.

5. HOW: STYLE, TONE, NARRATIVE VOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

Style: “style” is an extremely complex phenomenon and it is fairly difficult to define it. In the case of literature, it is the arrangement of words in a manner best expressing the individuality of the author and the idea and intent in the author’s mind. But it is not just that. It is the special use of language typical of (1) a particular genre (poetic style, scholarly style) or (2) an individual (slang style, polished style), but it is also the general impression the author and the characters convey through their use of language. So, the style of a particular literary work depends on language, and three things in particular:

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1. the tone – this belongs to the author

2. the voice – this belongs to the narrator

2. and the point of view or perspective – this belongs to the so-called focaliser.

(1) Tone (hangnem) is generally the attitude of the narrator towards what he says or describes. It is always expressed through language, and the particular manner in which the author tells the story has some significance. Naturally, a certain plot may be told in an infinite number of ways and it is the author’s decision what kind of language he or she chooses to present the story. We may look at the particular words, their register (official, everyday, or slang expressions), we may examine the proportion of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Does the author/narrator describe the person or events he is talking about? Or does he just give us the bare facts? What is the significance of that? Of course, we may go on to examine the sentences, the figures of speech, the rhythm of the whole text, the balance of dialogue and narration, and so on. Is there perhaps a discrepancy between the tone of the author and the events he is narrating? That might also be important and has some function (creates either a comic or a tragic effect.) Every word or expression has some significance in a literary work, and therefore must be given special attention.

2. Voice: to be able to speak about the narratorial voice, we have to make a difference between the author and the narrator. This difference is crucial since the real writer is never identical with his or her narrator. The voice we can hear speaking in the story from the beginning belongs to the narrator, even if he or she is not present in the story. The difference is important because the author might not identify with his narrator who is an imaginary person. The distance between the two often creates an artistic effect.

1. real author → real reader

2. narrator → narratee

The text belongs to him, the voice in which the text speaks Voice belongs to him, he can be a character, etc. Mind that the text is never narrated by the “real”, flesh and blood author, it is always narrated by the narrator. If the two are the same, we speak about an autobiography.

The person to whom the story is told in the text, when the author addresses the reader as „you”, „dear reader”.

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3. implied author → implied reader

(“a műbe beleértett író”) Not a real human being, an effect created by the text, never speaks, always silent, can be guessed by tone, style ↓ can be educated disillusioned, etc.E.g. in Légy jó mindhalálig → we have an author disillusioned with the bullying of others.

(“a műbe beleértett olvasó”)This reader must know something of the world the author creates, he’s part of an audience.Eg. Egri csillagok is clearly addressed to someone who knows the basic facts of Hungarian history. While Danielle Steel creates an implied reader who waits for romantic stories.

We can talk about voice which belongs to the narrator and 3 . point of view ( focus) which belongs to the focalizer. (not necessarily the same).

For instance, in the sentence:

“I entered the room and saw Susannah crying”

I am the narrator and I am the focalizer as well, because we see the events from my point of view.

In the sentence, however,

“Peter entered the room and saw Susannah crying”

I am the narrator but the focalizer is Peter.

Types of Narrators:

1. Participant (dramatized)a. main character b. minor character

2. Non-participant (undramatized)a. omniscient

a1. editoriala2. impartial

b. limited omniscient c. objectived. unknowing

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Five criteria:

1. extent of participation: participant/ non-participant

2. extent of knowledge about the story: omniscient, limited omniscient, ordinary, unknowing (knows less than an ordinary person or the reader)

3. extent of involvement: editorial (passes judgement on the characters), impartial (neutral)

4. extent of reliability: reliable, unreliable, naive

unreliable: - moral reason: doesn’t want to tell the truth

- intellectually inferior.: can recall things but can’t think

- children

naive: - doesn’t really understand what he tells, often the sign of sophistication, new perspective. (Swift: Gulliver’s Travels or Montesquieu: Persian Letters).

5. overt/ covert

- overt: his/her presence can be felt, we have a clear voice, e.g. in Jane Austen’s novels

- covert: we have a voice speaking, but otherwise the narrator remains hidden or neutral

- special case: self-reflexive narrator → tells about the hardships, or the impossibility of story writing (postmodernism)

Mimesis ↔ Diegesis

Showing indirect info.20th centurywriters don’t decide what’s happening, just write down the events, no commentary“His face went read, rushed out, and slammed the door behind himself.”

Telling omniscienceRealist, 19th century modes

„ He was extremely angry.”

Jean-Paul Sartre (existentialist philosopher): „The theory of relativity applies in full to the universe of fiction. There is no more place for the privileged observer in a real novel than in

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the world of Einstein; it is not enough that the author avoids omniscient commentary, he must give the illusion that he does not even exist.”

Narrative techniques of representing human consciousness

1. indirect speech (reported thought): He thought that…..

2. free indirect speech: the logic of the text is provided by the mind is the character. The narrator is present in a grammatical way.

„She remembered how her father had shot dogs and she cried a lot. There was that poor boy, what did he die of so young?...” (Henry Green: Party Going)

3. internal monologue: we’re fully inside a character: silent speech, overhearing thoughts. Sentences are grammatical, possible to follow. The narrator’s grammatical traces disappear.

"Such fools we all are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."

-Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

4. stream- of consciousness technique: no narrator

Not just thoughts, but impression, memories, associations, ungrammatical, „below” the level of language, no full sentences, very private world.

Perspective (focalization)

1. double (e.g. the mixture of a childish perspective + adult point of view- an adult looks back on his childhood)

2. multiple – one event from several perspective (for instance, William Faulkner in his novel The Sound and the Fury [1929] presents the story of a decadent Southern family from 4 points of view. The family’s past gradually unfolds as we read all the four narratives. Or: a Victorian poet Robert Browning in his The Ring and the Book presents the story of a murder case from 11 different aspects with 11 narrators. )

3. shifting – one section of the story is told by A , the other by B…

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6. OTHER PROPERTIES OF NARRATIVE FICTION

Theme

- the main idea of the text

- there are several degrees of abstraction when we talk about a piece of fiction

1. the most basic is retelling the story, summarizing the plot (“this and this happened”)

2. a more abstract way is defining the subject matter: e.g. the subject matter of Red and Black by Stendhal is Julien Sorel’s struggles for recognition in the society. Or in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) the subject matter is Pip’s becoming a snob and denying the friendship of his good friends. Here we are still talking about the characters but in a more abstract way.

3. theme: the most abstract level. The theme of Red and Black is the conflict between ambition and true love. The theme of Great Expectations is the conflict between illusion and reality, or denying and re-finding one’s identity… This is the meaning of the work, usually the reason why the story had been written.

Motif (≠ motive!)

- in general: a frequently repeated element in literature or art.

- It can be a formal pattern, a poetic device, a character, an event, a colour, a language, item, etc….

- For example “the three wishes” or “the smallest son” is a common motif in folk tales; a duel is a frequent motif in chivalric romances or Western films; something horrible hiding in the attic or in the basement is a favourite motif of horror films; the colour red is a recurrent motif in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Thesis, Message, Moral

The thesis is the central argument of the novel. A thesis novel is a novel with a message (for instance one can say that the thesis of Golding’s Lord of the Flies is that without parental guide, children can turn into savages).

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Message: what the novel or writer “sends” us through the work. We must be careful with “messages”, though, because in really valuable works it is not easy to point out any clear message. (Modern writers are also sceptical of sending a message to the reader.) If it is easy, then probably we are dealing with a lower quality, didactic work, whose aim is only to teach without much artistic value.

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V. POETRY

1. PROSODY

1. Metrical systems (verselési rendszerek)

There are three basic metrical systems (rhyme patterning) in most European poetry.

a, stress-syllable metre (szótag – és ütemszámláló versmérték): Stress- syllable metre works rather like our „szimultán verselés”. In the stress- syllable metre, to identify a line (or stanza) and describe it from a metrical point of view we count the number of syllables in each line as well as the number of stressed syllables: as a result, we get the number and nature of the feet making up the line. Thus, a line belonging to this metrical system is characterised by the number and nature of feet. For instance: an iambic hexameter („iambic” identifies the nature of the dominant foot „hexameter” identifies the number of feet.) We use names of Greek feet to describe this metre, although the distinction between the syllables is not based on their length, as in our „időmértékes verselés” but on whether they are stressed or unstressed. About ninety percent of English poetry belongs to this category.

b, accentual metre („ütemszámláló versmérték”): to describe a line we simply count the stressed (accented) syllables. Most Old English poetry belongs to this metrical system (which is much like our „hangsúlyos verselés”) The stressed syllables can be recognised easily because they alliterate with each other. Within the same poem, lines might vary as regards the number of syllables in them, what matters is that they should all have the same number of stressed syllables (again, as in Hungarian folk poetry).

c, quantitative metre: this is like our „ időmértékes verselés”. : syllables are long and short than stressed and unstressed. We count in Greek feet, a sin the case of stressed–syllable metre. You won’t find any examples of it in your studies of English- language poetry, this is just a theoretical possibility in English poetry.

d, free verse („szabadvers”): this is not really a separate category, but the name for the kind of patterning – or lack of patterning – that does not follow any of the traditional metrical systems.

2. Stress-syllable metre

Feet

In English poetry, feet are based on the length of the syllables but on their being stressed or unstressed, still, they are identified by the Greek names that we have come to associate with „időmértékes verselés”. The six important feet are the following:

iamb (unstressed- stressed) u –

trochee (s-u) − u

anapest (u-u-s) u u –

dactyl (s-u-u) − u u

spondee (s-s) − −

pyrrhic (u-u) u u

Lines

They have Greek names in stress syllable metre, the name defines the nature of the dominant foot (e.g. iambic or trochaic) and the number of feet. Thus, a tetrameter is a line consisting of four feet, a pentameter consist of five feet, a hexameter of six. Two lines have special names:

- the iambic hexameter is called alexandrine

- unrhyming iambic pentameter: blank verse (Shakespeare, Milton). Blank verse is basically a one-line stanzaic pattern.

Examples:

(1) stress-syllable meter

u - u - u - u - u - (iambic pentameter)

“Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d

Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 24.)

u - u - u - u - (iambic tetrameter)

“The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

The waves are dancing fast and bright

Blue isles and snowy mountains wear

The purple noon’s transparent might.” (Shelley, “Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples”)

u - u - u - (iambic trimeter)

“The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits. – On the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone […]” (M. Arnold, “Dover Beach”)

(2) accentual metre

“True is the tale that I tell of my travels” (from OE elegy “The Seafarer”)

“Oft to the Wanderer weary of exile

Cometh God’s pity, compassionate love.” (from OE elegy “The Wanderer”)

Blank verse:

u - u - u - - - u -

“Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death

u - u - u - u - u u u - (u)

The memory be green and that it us befitted

To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom

To be contracted in one brow of woe.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

“’O father what intends thy hand’, she cried

‘Against thy only son? What fury, O son,

‘Possesses thee to bend that mortal dart

‘Against thy father’s head? And know’st for whom?’” (Milton, Paradise Lost)

A few hints on scansion

(Source: http://www.btk.ppke.hu/uploads/introduction/poetry/metre.html#3)

When you scan (= Hungarian ‘skandál’) a line of accentual syllabic verse, you identify the abstract pattern that the line manifests. This might sound like a scary task when you do it for the first time; however, it is not as hopeless as it might at first appear. Below are listed a few easy steps which, if you follow them in this order, will help make scansion easier for you.

Step one: read the line out loud.

Remember that poetry is primarily written to be recited and listened to. Keep it in mind also that metrics is not an exact science. Although several books have been written on the subject and serious scholars discuss and often disagree about the scansion of particular lines, you need not worry about this. Your ear is always your best guide when it comes to scansion.

Step two: mark the stressed syllables.

It should not be very difficult to identify the stresses after you have listened to the line. If, however, you are lost, you may use the following rules of thumb:

- one-syllable content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are usually stressed, while one-syllable non-content words (auxiliaries, articles, prepositions, pronouns etc.) tend to be unstressed; (this of course might vary according to the grammatical structure of the sentence in which these words appear);

- all words with two syllables have one stress (even non-content words such as below, upon, without, herself etc.); two syllable non-content words are often shortened in poetry (e.g. e’er for ever, o’er for over), these shortened forms are usually unstressed;

- three-syllable words must have one stress and may or may not have a secondary stress (e.g. in the couplet ‘What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ the word symmetry has a secondary stress on the last syllable ( ) but ‘symmetry’ can function as a dactyl ( ), too, if the rhythm of the line requires that interpretation;

- words that have four or more syllables always have a secondary stress;

- note that the stress is always fixed in English words. If you are uncertain about which syllable should be stressed, use your dictionary.

Step three: mark the unstressed syllables.

This can be done almost automatically after you have marked the stressed syllables. Note that because of the natural rhythms of the English language three unstressed syllables do

not usually appear next to each other. If this were the case put a stress on the middle one as in the example below:

I waited for the train at Coventry → I waited for the train at Coventry

Step four: try to discover some regularity, identify feet and mark them.

Remember that your scansion is not complete until you have unambiguously separated the feet of the line. Thus the scansion of the line above is finished when you have the following form:

I waited for the train at Coventry

Step five: if no apparent regularity occurs, look at the rest of the text.

Irregular lines often appear in poems written in accentual syllabic verse. If you look at the whole of the text, however, you can determine the overall pattern and from this knowledge you can draw conclusions as to the interpretation of individual lines.

Step six: keep in mind that scanning is not an end in itself!

If your scansion does not seem to provide you with any interesting information, do not scan that poem (unless of course you are specifically instructed by your teacher to do so). Use scansion as a tool that helps you to notice and to describe important meaning-productive features of the poem you are reading (see some typical cases below).

The function of metrics, the use of scansion

You will find that scansion and the terminology related to accentual syllabic verse is useful because it will help you in expressing yourself clearly. If, for example, you intuitively perceive some special rhythmic quality or a change in the rhythm of the poem, you will be able to state your intuition in exact terms. Between the fourth and fifth stanzas of William Blake’s ‘Tyger’ there is, for instance, a radical change in the rhythm. In stanza four (as well as in the two preceding stanzas) the rhythm is heavy, powerful and energetic:

What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

This rhythm changes in stanza five to become smooth and calm:

When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

This change is quite conspicuous; even an amateur can perceive it. If, however, you know how to scan poetry, you can do more than just notice this: you can understand and state what actually happens in these two stanzas. What happens is that the predominantly trochaic rhythms of stanza four (suggesting strength in overcoming difficulty, power, energy) are changed into smoother anapaestic/iambic rhythms in the fifth stanza.

Apart from making it easier to state your intuitions about the rhythm of a poem, your skill in scansion and your knowledge of metrics will also be useful in making you notice and appreciate the many ways in which poets use metre to communicate meanings. Lines in different metre tend to have distinct sound effects and poets often make use of this by choosing the appropriate form for their topic. Iambic lines, for example, are the most natural metrical pattern in English, as the English language tends to be iambic in general. Iambic verse thus often creates an easy-flowing, natural effect. Trochees (as well as dactyls), by contrast, usually create an effect of forcefulness, of effort or difficulty, partly because of the powerful downbeat with which they begin and partly because this pattern goes directly against the natural rhythm of the English language. Anapaests usually suggest playfulness with their easy-flowing skipping rhythm.

Poets can variously make use of these qualities of metrical arrangements and use the effects for their own purposes. When you identify the verse form, your task is, therefore, primarily to see and state how the metrical rhythm is used in the particular poem you are reading.

Another typical way in which poets use metre is the juxtaposition of the abstract pattern and the natural rhythm of the words spoken. When poets use a particular metrical form they create expectations in the reader and thus, when we read the poem, an abstract pattern will always independently exist in our mind. By making the natural rhythm of the actual words break away from this abstract pattern, poets can achieve various effects and communicate ideas. Trochees or spondees are, for example, often inserted in iambic verse to give emphasis to a phrase or sentence. This is especially powerful if the trochee or spondee appears in line-initial position.

Look at, for example, how the spondees inserted in the iambic pentameters of the opening passage of William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ emphasise the length of the five years that elapsed since the speaker’s last visit at the place:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the lengthOf five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springsWith a soft inland murmur.

In some cases rhythmic change can even be mimetic. Look at, for instance, how the trochee inserted in the second foot of this iambic pentameter line suggests the act of tiptoeing:

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill

Stanza types, stanzaic patterns

Units within a poem (”versszak”): stanza ( in regular metre, that is, when the stanzas are all the same and follow the same metrical pattern), or verse paragraph ( in irregular metre, when the units are of different length.)

We identify and describe a stanzaic pattern by:

1. identifying the types of lines that make up the stanza (e.g. we find that the stanza contains four iambic pentameters)

2. identifying the rhyme scheme of the stanza.

Here are a few of the most frequent stanzaic patterns

Two-line stanza: couplet in general, heroic couplet (two rhyming iambic pentameters.)

Example: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this and this gives life to thee” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18.)

Three-line stanza: terza rima (aba bcb cdc etc.) Dante’s Divina Commedia, Shelley’s „Ode to the West Wind”:

O, WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, (a)Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead (b)Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, (a)

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, (b)Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou, (c)Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed (b)

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, (c)

Each like a corpse within its grave, until (d)Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow (c)

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (d)(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) (e)With living hues and odours plain and hill: (d)

Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; (f)Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear! (f)

Four-line stanza: quatrain in general

- heroic quatrain: iambic tetrameter, abab

ballad stanza: iambic, tetrameter, trimeter, tetrameter, trimeter, abxb (e.g. Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, or Arany János’s „ A walesi bárdok”)

“It is an ancient Mariner

And he stoppeth one of three.

“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye

Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?” (Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

- In Memoriam stanza (Alfred Tennyson’s „In Memoriam”): four iambic tetrameters, abba

“The hills are shadows and they flow,

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.” (Alfred Tennyson)

-

Eight-line stanza: Spenserian stanza (eight iambic pentameters and one alexandrine, ababbcbcc), named after Edmund Spenser, a Renaissance poet.

Sonnet, 14 lines, Petrarchan: octave + sestet, Spenserian, Shakespearean: 3 quatrains and a couplet.

3.Other terms related to prosody

Rhyme schemes:

- alternate rhyme (abab)

- envelope (embracing) rhyme (abba)

masculine (rising) and feminine (falling) rhyme: in masculine rhyme, the final syllable is stressed, usually a one-syllable word (e.g. light/flight). In feminine rhyme, the final syllable is unstressed, the rhyming words consist of more than one syllables (e.g. cherries/berries, treasure/pleasure)

assonance: a kind of rhyme in which only the vowels rhyme (e.g. fight/mind).

“One day I wrote her name upon the strand

but came the waves and washed it away.

Again I wrote it with a second hand

but came the tide and made my pains his prey.

‘Vain man’, said she ‘that in vain doest assay

A mortal thing so to immortalize,

For I myself shall like to this decay

And eke my name be weeped out likewise.’”

(Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 75.)

Sound effects:

1. alliteration: the repetition of consonants, usually at the beginning of words or stressed syllables. (“borne on the bier with white and bristly beard”)

2. onomatopoeia (hangutánzás): when the sound of words resembles or imitates noises and moods (e.g. crackle, clatter, rustle, thud, etc.)

2. RHETORIC, TROPES, FIGURES OF SPEECH

“Rhetoric” has two meanings:

1. the study of eloquence, the art of persuasion

2. the study of figures of speech

There are two kinds of figures of speech:

1. Scheme: it does not change the meaning but the word order, syntax, letters and creates figurality through this. For example: parallelism (“Lovers are mad for their love, kings for power and poets for ideals”); antithesis ("One small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind." – Neil Armstrong on landing on the Moon); inversion (“Had I power, I would exterminate all enemies of this noble cause.”), etc.

2. Trope: changes meaning; it means something and says something else

Trope (= költői kép)

Two views:

1. trope = originally means a “turn (of language)” → if deviates from the „straight” road, the normal use of it

- violates the conventions of communication

- we say sg. and we mean sg. else

- “My love is a red, red rose” → semantically and logically abnormal, my lover is obviously not a red rose.

2. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche said, however, that there is no difference between ordinary and figurative use of language. Language is already, essentially figurative, we always use figures in speech ( dead metaphors usually): the “higher education”, “advanced language exam”, “the leg of the chair”, “a bottle” → they are all dead metaphors, that is, we have forgotten that once they were metaphorical expressions. The so-called „true”, “objective” language, scientific or philosophical language is also full of metaphors, thus cannot claim to be more faithful to reality than “poetic” language. Nietzsche says rhetoricity is the basic form of existence in language.

There are four basic tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony.

- other tropes: allegory, symbol, personification, synaesthesia, parable, paradox, satire, simile…

METAPHOR:

The origin of the word: Greek “meta” (over, beyond), “pherein” (carry) – carry meaning over

→ carrying over the meaning of one word onto another, or the transportation of a word into a different semantic field.

A metaphor is the identification of two things on the basic of similarity.

Structure: A is B because of common feature C.

A B

tenor vehicle

(azonosított) (azonosító)

viszonyított viszonyító

C

ground

“My love is a red, red, rose”

Tenor: my love; Vehicle: red rose

Example: Love − Rose : nominal

2 nouns are identified.

beautiful full (explicit)

passionate

“My love blossoms”

Tenor: My love; Vehicle: (missing, it’s only implied that it is a rose); Ground: both blossom. This is the implied metaphor.

Love − ( ) : verbal

implied

blossoms

“My heart flies”

Heart − Bird

flying

Other examples (are they explicit or implied metaphors?): “time’s running out”, “life is a journey”, “a sea of troubles”, “all the world’s stage”, “you are my destiny”, “so are you to my thoughts as food to life”.

The greater the distance between the tenor and vehicle, the greater the effect.

Conceit (originates from the Italian word “concetto,” “conceptismo”, meaning “concept”) → A conceit is one of the favourite tropes used by Baroque poets. In a conceit, there is a huge difference between the tenor and the vehicle. → John Donne, for instance, compares his love to the bite of a flea („The Flea”) – according to Surrealists, there are no two things in the world that can’t be brought together ( „The meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operation table.”)

Simile: „extended” metaphor, two things are connected with „like”, „as”: “My love is like a red rose.”

METONYMY = transposition of name

- Identification of two things on the basis of connection, contiguity

- not as surprising as metaphor (the connection between the two things already exists)

- connection can be based on:

1. material Gold = money, steel =sword

glass = cup

2. space: the whole village was there - the people living in the village

3. cause and effect: this woman will be your death

4. time: this cruel century = people living in that century are cruel

They are usually idioms, used every day. For example: “press” ( media: the pressing machine used in producing newspapers comes to mean the whole of printed media); “mother tongue” ( the organ used for speaking comes to stand for language). “Washington has announced…” means “the American government residing in Washington”.

“I’m all ears” → metaphor + metonymy at the same time: I identify myself with ears: metaphor; “ear” stands for attention: metonymy

Metonymies are generally considered to be less poetic than metaphors, they are more everyday, less surprising, because they use an already existing connection.

Synecdoche: A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part. For example: “a sail” might refer to “a ship”. In the sentence “I need every hand in this job”, “hand” refers to “people. When you hear in the Holy Prayer that “give us this day our daily bread”, “bread” means food and comfort in general.

3. ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL

1. Allegory ( “allos” – other + “agorein” – speak, “to speak otherwise”)

Three senses:

a, a trope: personification allegory, an abstract concept embodied in a concrete physical shape ( Unity, Charity, Peace, Fear) → in Medieval morality plays.

b, a chain of metaphors: Ariosto: Orlando Furioso:

A naked old man through lost things into the river -->

The old man is the allegory of Time, the river is the allegory of Oblivion.

An allegory is more sustained than metaphor, each element can be „translated” into concrete meaning.

Also: Petőfi: “Feltámadott a tenger” – sea: people; boat: aristocrats

→ medieval way of interpreting the Bible – solving or explaining the contradictions (e.g. Jesus’s parables → going to a deeper level) St. Augustine

c, narrative genre: Orwell: Animal Farm (1945), John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress; Dante: Divine Comedy

→ vertical level of meaning

→ abstract meaning dominates

Medieval hermeneutics: 4 layers

1. sensus historicus: (literal or historical meaning) – what the Scripture says or denotes directly. For example, Jerusalem means “the biggest city where the Jews live”

2. sensus allegoricus: explains the text with regard to the doctrinal content of the church’s dogma: (Jerusalem – the temple of Jesus)

3. sensus moralis: moral application to the reader or listener. (Jerusalem – the human soul)

4. sensus anagogicus: secret metaphorical and escathalogical knowledge (gnosis) (Jerusalem – Heaven)

Medieval reading of Dante:

“Dante with the help of Vigil finds Beatrice.”

(Man) with the help of (Intellect) finds (Faith)

Symbol:

origin: syn + ballein (throw together)

1. everyday meaning: „The lion is the symbol of Britain.”; “The colour white is the symbol of innocence”

2. semiotic meaning (relationship between signifier and signified), established by Charles Sanders Peirce

icon − index − symbol

↓ ↓ ↓

similarityphotograph

„to represent”„to make present”

portrait

connectionfootprint

„to speak on behalf of”

smoke coming out of a building → fire

conventiontradition

flags → countrystop – sign.

cross → Christianity numbers!

„to stand for”

3. In literature: an object or landscape, creature, act, figure means „more” than what it represents, has a surplus of meaning.

Allegory Symbolonly abstract meaning both concrete and abstract

meaningone-to-one reference, there is

only one single correct interpretation

several meanings, not one interpretation

„translatable” „untranslatable”, translating a symbol takes away its essential

meaningappeals to the intellect appeals to the physical details,

sensesneeds sg. outside itself doesn’t need a reference outside

itselfbasis of Medieval Renaissance

poetryBasis of Romantic and modern

poetry

VI. DRAMA

Drama is a very interesting kind of literature in the sense that it exists in two forms: as text and as performance. Most plays are still printed and put on stage. However, there are some exceptions. The Italian commedia dell’arte kind of drama was very rarely written down, it was a practice in improvisation, it had stock characters and some plot elements, but the text was largely up to the actors. Conversely, Romantic “book dramas” (plays written by Romantic poets like Shelley’s The Cenci or Byron’s Manfred) are almost impossible to be put on stage (though some directors have tried), because they are essentially for reading rather than watching. But generally, drama as text can rarely exist with it being performed as well.

1. TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

“The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily, that’s what tragedy means.” (Tom Stoppard, contemporary dramatist)

To be able to speak about drama, and to determine the mode of the “tragic”, we shall have a brief history of drama and how the two modes, tragedy and comedy were separated. In the discussion of tragedy, we will mainly focus on Aristotle’s Poetics (some ideas are already familiar).

1. A brief history of the birth of drama

Drama, at least in the European sense, evolved in ancient Greece to a large extent. Its roots lay in the Dionysian festivities when the god of fertility, Dionysus was celebrated. One high point of the festival was the songs sung by the chorus. They were citizens of Athens, dressed as goats/satyrs, singing about the deeds of this god and later other gods. These songs were called tragoedia, “goat song”. Hence, tragedy.

As a second step, the first actor appeared (called hypokrites, “the one who answers”). The first actors were introduced by a dramatist called Thespis, who was sometimes also an actor. Later, the number of actors rose to two (dialogue was born), then to three. The rule was introduced that in one scene, no more than three actors can speak (although more actors can be on the stage). The role of the chorus changed, it lost its importance, and was restricted to comment what was going on stage or warn the audience that something is going to happen. Secondly, when the drama competitions and trilogies (3 plays) and tetralogies (4 plays) were introduced, the last act was a satyr play by the chorus, which repeated and made fun of the tragedy to ease the sense of catharsis and terror.

It has to be remarked here that theatre going in ancient Athens meant something different than now. Today, we associate theatre going with elegance and formal clothes. Back then, going to the show was a truly popular form of entertainment: everybody went there, the rich and the poor, too. Since very few people could read and write, theatre was the only way they could be educated morally, so going there was more or less compulsory for an Athenian citizen.

2. Aristotle’s Poetics

The main questions covered in Poetics:

1. How can different arts and genres be separated? According to him, we have to determine which branch of art imitates (see mimesis)

what and with what means. Based on this, he distinguishes music (imitates with voice and sound effects), dance (imitates with movements) and poetry (imitates with speech, sounds, music and movement).

2. What does poetry (drama) imitate? It can imitate a sad story, with suffering heroes, presenting a story with a morale. This

is tragedy. Or it can imitate a joyful, happy, funny story, with action in the centre. This is comedy. According to Aristotle, tragedy is more sophisticated, more noble than comedy. (It is possible to speak about poetry and drama because tragedy and comedy evolved from dithyrambic and iambic poetry, respectively).

3. How does drama/poetry imitate? According to Aristotle, there are three basic ways to render an action: 1) as poetry

when only one voice speaks. 2) as drama, where the characters speak but the author does not, and as 3) epic, where both the author/narrator and the characters speak. (You can realise that narrative belongs to both category 1. and 3.)

4. The structure of tragedyUnity, wholeness and magnitude. Tragedy must be a finished, complete and a full

series of actions, and it has a determined length (90-120 minutes) (See the Chapter on “Plot”). “Full” means having a beginning, a middle and an end. This is common sense, of course, but what Aristotle means is that a tragedy cannot begin just anywhere. The beginning means that

it is not necessarily the consequence of a preceding action. The play begins where everything is ready to be set in motion. (Just imagine the beginning of Hamlet with Hamlet’s birth. The whole play would lose focus and become an epic.) Likewise, the end is the logical conclusion of events. The play must end after the catharsis and after the peripeteia – anagnorisis – pathos had taken place. No element can be taken away or added, because this way the tragedy would fall apart. Logically, there should be no element that could be taken away because then it would be unnecessary and would “dilute” the strict system. These are what Aristotle calls episodes.

Thus, the beginning, middle and the end must form a strict whole. Life, on the other hand, rarely happens in this pattern. Therefore, the task of the dramatist is not to “copy” life itself, that is, put on stage events that have already happened in real life. A tragic story on stage does not represent reality, but possible events that could have taken place. This is a very important realisation by Aristotle: in tragedy, the events form a strict logical system that is closed in itself. Thus, the story is always fictional. That is why Aristotle thinks drama /poetry is deeper and more sophisticated than history writing or chronicles, which are only about events that really happened.

5. The persons in the tragedyThe characters in comedy are people of lower rank, those in tragedies are excellent

people with noble birth and possessing outstanding morals. It is also important that the characters should be probable, credible, so they should not do anything that is inconsistent with the characteristic features.

6. The language of tragedyIt is not unlike everyday speech, but has to use elements of public speaking and

arguments (rhetoric), in order to convince the other character and the audience. But while speeches appeal to the senses, to reason, dramatic diction must appeal to the emotions.

3. After Aristotle

The Greek model was largely adapted by the Romans (Seneca, Plautus, Terence), but they could not reach the complexity and depth of Greek drama. Mostly, their tragedies remained moralizing and didactic, but they still adhered to Aristotle’s model.

In the Middle Ages, despite the fact that Aristotle was a great influence then, his Poetics was practically forgotten. First, the medieval people had little drama (it was not preferred by the religious world order), and what little drama they had, it was of course the dramatisation of the Bible or mankind’s fate (morality plays, mystery plays and miracles).

Poetics was “discovered” in the middle of the 16th century, in the time of the Renaissance, when the whole age was about discovering the ancient classics once again. However, those who read Aristotle then, sort of misread him. Although he suggested that the “classical unities” should be there – the unity of time, place and action – he actually recommended

these, rather than prescribing them. Renaissance scholars heavily insisted on these unities, they saw them as harmonious, logical, commonsensical, and natural. These unities are: 1) the unity of time – the plot should not exceed the plot on the stage, or maximum a day (that is, months or years should not pass between scenes); 2) the unity of place – the place of action should not change (it can be within the same building); and 3) the unity of action – no sub-plots should be included, there should be one clear line of plot all throughout. A fourth principle may also be added: (4) the genres must not be mixed, tragedy and comedy must be kept separate, “tragedicomedy” is forbidden.

What is remarkable is that the greatest Renaissance English poet, Shakespeare, does not observe these rules at all. Although he uses some principles of Aristotle (for example, on peripeteia, anagnorisis, pathos, hubris, etc), but he directly goes against the classical rules. In Hamlet, for instance, none of the three unities can be found, the action takes place in way more than 24 hours, at various places and there are several sub-plots included; he mixes comedy and tragedy freely in the play. Basically, only two of his plays, The Comedy of Errors (1590) and The Tempest (1611) follow classical unities. The reason for this was quite complex, but let us only remark here that the English Renaissance theatre never committed itself to strict principles, it borrowed the principles of Classicism relatively late, it was a popular theatre that upheld various previous traditions (popular plays and medieval drama).

After Shakespeare, the classical style gained ground. The champion of neoclassical rules, John Dryden in An Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), launches a heavy attack against tragicomedy and Shakespeare, saying than a tragicomedy is absurd, in which, “in two hours and a half, we run through all the fits of Bedlam” (=madhouse) (we have joy, sadness, passion, honour, duel, etc). His ideal is the French neoclassical stage, in which the unities and the “purity” of the genre are observed in the name of nature and common sense. (Let us remark here that Shakespeare was not a famous author in the 18th century, due to these attacks! He was only discovered by the Romantics.)

Without going much into the history of the drama, let us remark here for a long time, the principles of Aristotle were adhered to, although they were modified and loosened here and there. For instance, the protagonist of tragedy, from the 18th century, is not necessarily a noble, excellent and rich person: middle-class people appear as the protagonists of domestic tragedies (“polgári szomorújáték”).

Like in so many things, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of modernism brought several changes. The limits of the Aristotelian scheme were extended. Ibsen, for instance, replaced the dénouement for discussion. G. B. Shaw wrote the whole of his play as discussions and less action. Generally, action began to lose its importance. Nietzsche introduced to concept of tragic joy. In the twentieth century, various forms of “experimental” plays appeared, some dramatists advocated ritual and the total theatre, like W. B. Yeats in his one-act plays (which could be seen as a return to the original meaning of drama). After the Second World War, the theatre of the absurd was born, which tried to put on stage the essential absurdity of life, calling into question nearly all Aristotelian elements of drama, like

plot, conflict, character development, and so on. But still, conventional plays adhere to the basic principles that were laid down in Poetics. (A number of popular films extensively use the Aristotelian concepts!)

2. COMEDY AND THE COMIC

“All tragedies are finished by a death / All comedies are ended by a marriage” (Byron)

Aristotle: comedy is clearly lower than tragedy, tragedy is able to induce catharsis, which comes about as the result of the folly of the hero. According to Aristotle, drama must proceed from the happy state of things to the unhappy one.

Usual structure in tragedy: order disorder; in comedy: order disorder order re-established.

Later, in the French courts, the distinction between the two dramatic qualities was marked by customs: tragedies were watched standing, while comedies were watched sitting.

Northrop Frye, in his book The Anatomy of Criticism, approaches literature from the point of view of recurring motifs and archetypes (an archetype, meaning “ancient, original type” is an ideal example, a prototype, for instance in folklore, the youngest son, the wise old man, the trickster, etc.). Frye identifies different seasons with genres. Spring: Comedy, Summer: Romance, Autumn: Tragedy, Winter: Satire. In Frye’s concept, comedy, symbolised by Spring, means the victory of forces of life over Winter (=limitations, death, sadness). For instance, the relationship of a young couple, they desire union, have to go through different obstacles and in the end they unite, and get married. Symbolically, Nature is reborn and everyone is happy.

What is comic? Why do we laugh? (Theories)

1. The source of the comic is the object of laughter .

a.) The defect theory: the source of comedy is some sort of defect or error. Aristotle: “some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive” (for instance we would not consider Shakespeare’s Richard III a comic figure, even though he’s hunchback). Thomas Hobbes, a 17th century philosopher says that there is indeed pain in comedy, but it is only comic if we are not affected (in the case of slapstick or burlesque plays).

b.) The contrast theory: some sort of incongruity, discrepancy, contradiction appears in the object. For instance, the English novelist Henry Fielding thought that the source of ridiculous is affectation, where someone tries to pretend to be someone that he is not.

2. The source of the comic is in the relationship between the subject and the object of laughter.

a.) The relief or release theory: the source of laughter is the release of energy or tension in the “mind”. St. Thomas of Acquinas, a Medieval scholar thought that when we laugh, “the soul takes a rest”. Kant claimed that we laugh when we expect something great and we get something ridiculous, this causes tension, which is released through laughter (the case of anticlimax). According to Freud, if we see that someone spends too much energy doing something, we compare ourselves with him/her (e.g., exaggerated manner of walking, a man trying to get up after falling flat), and the perception of energy difference causes laughter. (See “Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious”)

b.) The superiority theory: we can only laugh if we feel superior to the one we laugh at. Thus, laughter always includes power, laughter can work as a means of exclusion, scapegoating, “marking someone” as ridiculous. This is the basis of satire.

c.) The defamiliarisation theory: when something familiar appears as abnormal, out of context, we find that ridiculous (or fearful). For instance if a man appears in women’s clothes or if a film is speeded up or slowed down, that’s usually ridiculous, because what was familiar now becomes strange, even uncanny, “unheimlich” as Freud put it. (It is worth thinking about the relationship of fear, the return of something disturbing and laughter and comedy. Maybe the two are not too far from each other.)

One of the main theorists of laughter was the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) who wrote a study entitled Laughter. In that he summarised three main aspects of laughter:

1. Laughter is human . Only human beings laugh and only human beings are able to “humanize” the world. That is, we attribute animals or things human features and we find a hamster or a rabbit nice, because it resembles a nice face and we think monkeys are funny, for the same reason.

2. Laughter is detached (indifferent) . We cannot identify with people we laugh at, or feel pity for them.

3. Laughter is collective . We never laugh alone, we always suppose there are people, a community laughing with us (either physically or in imagination), so laughter always creates a community. Just think of the embarrassing situation when you laugh out loud while the others stay silent.

4. According to Bergson, the source of comedy is some mechanical rigidity , when the body does not obey and the human being begins to resemble machine, for instance, falling flat in the street. The same phenomenon can be seen with clowns or pantomime artists.

Kinds of Comedy

1. Humour – pure comedy, nothing harmful is included, no violence, no aggression.

2. Satire is directed against someone with an aim (usually the aim of making him/her/them a better person). Here, aggression or at least critical attitude is included.

3. Sarcasm is also directed against others, but the aim is not really to teach but hurt them.

4. Slapstick is a low kind of comedy in which a lot of physicality is included (throwing cakes at each other, etc, think of Bud Spencer films).

5. Black humour is when we treat a serious or tragic event in a light or frivolous manner, seemingly not recognising its tragic quality. It is usually the expression of helplessness in an absurd world. (See Joseph Heller: Catch-22)

6. Irony is a trope (we say something and we mean something else). It can be verbal: here the speaker is superior to the others, it’s a controlled kind of irony. We speak about Socratic irony when we pretend ignorance (“Please correct me if I am mistaken…”). Dramatic irony is an instance when someone, the victim of dramatic irony says or does something, not being aware of the fact that he/she is the victim of irony. The best example is the French king, Louis XVI, who, on the day when the Bastille was besieged by the common people, wrote in his diary: “Rien.” (Nothing.) We speak about tragic irony when it has tragic consequences, for instance Oedipus investigating after the murderer of his father, that is, himself. We can also speak about general or cosmic irony, when we think that life or the world itself is ironic. (Think of history, history is ironic because we never know the consequences of our deeds, only after they have an effect on us.) The German poet Heine maintained that the world is God’s dream, who is going to wake up some day, rub his eyes and the whole world will disappear.

Comedy on the level of literary texts

1. Parody: the comic imitation of other texts, writers, styles, genres with a critical purpose. Parody always appears when a style, theme, genre becomes obsolete, out-of-date or simply boring. The first novel, Cervantes’s Don Quixote was in fact the parody of chivalric romances that became tiresome by the 16th century. Other examples: Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall (1816) and Nightmare Abbey (1818) are parodies of Gothic novels so popular in the 18th century; Fielding’s Shamela is the parody of Richardson’s Pamela (18th century). Or just think of Karinthy Frigyes, Így írtok ti, or parodies of horror movies, ridiculing the conventions of such films.

2. Pastiche: the imitation of a particular style in a neutral manner. For example, John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1968) is written in the style of a 19th-century novel.

3. Travesty: the clumsy imitation of a writer, style or genre, treating an elevated subject in a low kind of language. Think of mock epics, like Petőfi’s A helység kalapácsa.

3. THE TYPOLOGY OF DRAMA

[based on Tamás Bécsy’s Drámamodellek és a mai dráma (Models of the Drama and Contemporary Plays)]

How can we determine the type of literature as drama?

1. Formal features: there are dialogues and names, and only dialogues, except for instructions of the author

2. Mimesis: according to Aristotle, the division of literary works on the basis of the degree of imitation (mimesis): in the case of poetic works it’s the poet that speaks directly; in an epic work the author speaks through his characters; in a play the author disappears and only the characters speak.

3. Conflict: It is only at the end of the 18th century that the idea of conflict appears and becomes a vital element in plays (Hegel). Hegel approached the problem of conflict from a philosophical point of view and applied it to plays. That is why conflict is still a broad term and it is often confused with opposition. Lukács György, for instance, says that conflict is a basic experience of life. Some say that a conflict involves an opposition between the desire of the hero and the realities of the world. But then every such opposition could be regarded as conflict. Another question is whether conflict involves actions? Up till the end of 19th century it does, since e.g. Hamlet fights against Claudius not only with words but with actions, Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House performs only one action, she leaves home, in G. B. Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, she and Vivie just discuss certain matters. We might make a distinction and say that there are plays of actions and plays of ideas. This way every kind of opposition is a conflict.

4. Performability: From the beginning of the 20th century ideas such as “performability” appear (whether it can be put on stage) – because to determine the category of a play “conflict” was no longer enough. The dialogue in itself is not a play; the play is a story, presented through actions and through actors who personify the characters, instead of symbolising. (E.g. at the mass [mise] the wafer [ostya] symbolises Christ’s body; the actor playing Mary does not symbolise her). There is a chance to include plays after World War II. If we say that a play is a play if it can be performed and the characters can be personified. But this definition is too broad, since we can include everything that can be

represented on stage, including pantomime, dance or operas. So we have to exclude theatrical practice, and deal only with written texts.

5. Action: One very important element of play is action. This definition neglects dramatic qualities (tragic and comic) thereby has a general value; but what can we say about absurd plays from the point of view of action?

6. Time and action. The dramatic tension is directed to the future, every action involves a number of potentialities that point toward the future. But, the play is represented in the present tense. The characters can talk about the past, but representing an action is only possible in the present tense. Of course the word “action” can take several forms; in Hamlet it can be fencing, or killing Polonius, in Nora it is the discussion of Nora and Helmer at the end; much of Shaw’s Saint Joan is discussion; in Godot there are petty actions and plenty of talking. So up till the end of the 19th century the plot of a play can be summarised by recounting the actions, after that we have to include the discussions and their results between the characters. By just retelling what happens in Saint Joan or Nora does not tell anything about the meaning of these plays.

7. How can we avoid excluding medieval moralities and mystery plays or Romantic poetic dramas, or contemporary plays?

8. The situation. Aristotle: As opposed to epic works, which, theoretically, can begin just anywhere, plays have a definite beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning of the play is not a continuation of something else, and after the end there is nothing to come. So the play begins at the point where everything is ready to start, where the action that initiates a change in life can begin. The beginning of the play is “dense”, it has to include all the potentialities that can realise during the play. (If later on something happens that was not potentially in the beginning, it makes the play epic, resembling a novel.) Several things can happen in the conflict between the hero and the opponent, for example,. but the final and decisive fact should follow logically from the possibilities built in the beginning. So the actions should follow logically and necessarily from each other. But is not just a sequence of cause and consequence. Anything becomes necessary in a play if it is built in the initial situation. This means that the play can only begin when every possibility, potentiality that can make up a situation is ready and there. The state of things in which the number of elements and their content include all the potential actions that will unfold in the play and includes also the change of relation between the characters is called situation. This leads to a definition of drama: the literary work in which a situation involves the realisation of potentialities, in which all the steps contribute to the realisations of possibilities inbuilt in a situation is called a drama. The situation includes the character of the protagonist, there is a set of beliefs even before the play starts (Hamlet believes in good rule before the death of his father) – this is what determines the situation. The play may give a sense of totality, a closeness, only because only those movements and actions can be imagined as parts of the play which are built in the situation. If a situation has more elements than necessary, the play becomes “diluted” if less, we don’t have a sense of totality. The situation is different from a state (állapot) and stance (helyzet) in that it is ready to “explode” and it cannot preserve its immobility with time, it has to change. The plot starts when the web of relations between the characters changes and includes another element (another character arrives) that rises the whole net

of relations one level higher: it becomes a situation. Evidently the play ends where the potentialities inbuilt in the situation are all realised. (Analogy of card game).

Conflict-based plays

1. The struggle of two sides. One is negative and the other is positive, without having to prove it. The “good” cause is often not strong enough to win, but the “bad” cause is weak enough to get vulnerable. Behind both sides there are powers and means and they use these means against each other. The situation includes the victory of the good side, irrelevant of the fact that objectively the good side may fall (Hamlet may die, but his cause wins.) The conf-based play always represents the borderline of two historical periods, it’s both a farewell to the past and hailing the future.

2. The precondition of ~ is that the general structure of society has to allow making n absolute distinction between good and bad, and that these abstract qualities may realise in the actions of two outstanding people.

3. The model. a. The play is built around a conflict which has two sides (positive-negative).b. The positive side is the same before the start of action. The conflict emerges when the

antagonist does something as a result of which this state cannot be maintained. c. The protagonist is not able to live in the situation created by the antagonist. d. The main characters act against each other. e. The given situation is in connection with the social problems of the age. f. The protagonist achieves his goal, and by the end the situation created by the antagonist

ceases to be. His (the protagonist) action changes the life of the whole community. g. There is a strong logical link between the scenes of the play, one scenes follows form the

other. Within the play it’s the first action of the antagonist that creates a situation (e.g. Claudius kills old Hamlet). The “deeper” reason for this is without the play. This ultimate reason is not within the play but in the worldview, the ideas of the actors/readers who take this action as negative (or positive) without proof.

h. There should be a question or a problem in the “spirit of the age” that can be embodied in one person in a credible way.

i. The man of the age should be one that is not able to live within the emerging situation. j. There should be a man who makes the action cease (even symbolically) credibly (e.g.

Fortinbras)

Examples: Sophocles: Antigone, Shakespeare: Hamlet, Katona József: Bánk bán; partly: Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare: Othello, Schiller: Intrigue and Love

The play with a focus

1. The essence of a problem can be focused in one character. This dominant character can be one around whom a web of relations emerges that contains the given problem. This kind of character simply “demands” certain relations, everyone around him/her has a given relation to him/her.

2. This character is often the last representative of a great cause. He is often passive and represents some positive value. Every character relates to him somehow. He cannot act, the environment is negative and active. He just suffers the actions, yet, paradoxically, he determines the relationships around him. His is the typical situation of the victim. The basic difference between the protagonist of the conflict-based play and this kind of hero is that the former is largely active, he works on restoring the previous state of things. The victim is positive but passive. The conflict-based play is the situation before the victory of the “good cause”, the situation here is after the fall of the “good cause”.

3. The model.a. In the centre there is a “radiant” focus – it determines everyone’s behaviour.b. The focus is a passive protagonist or a moral factor or even a symbol. c. The play represents the relations to this focus. d. These plays resemble a kind of rite and carry a good deal of lyricism. e. The problem of representation: there is no general way of representing the relations to this

focus, they can be filled with diverse contents. So there is a greater chance to present delicate relations.

f. Lyricism. The play is concentrated on the situation. In the conflict-based play there are three stages: the positive before the situation; the situation and its unfolding; positive stage once again. In Hamlet, for instance, it is important what stance the protagonist takes before the onset of the play. In ~ plays, the stage before the situation is negligible. (We know some things about Lear’s previous life, but it is not important). What is crucial is what is unfolding before our eyes. The situation here is similar to the experience of a poet. The experience unfolds in a chronological manner, but the cause and consequence line is not determining here. In the focus there is the situation that is unfolding after the previous events. Neither is the stage after the situation important.

g. Tension. The tension in the case of conflict-based plays is a good deal greater because the existential danger generated by the antagonist is in the centre of the play. That is why we can identify with these protagonists whose life is at risk. The plays with focus have at their centre characters that determine the whole world around them that’s why identifying with them is very difficult. The spectator can rather identify himself with those who have some kind of relation to the character in focus. Naturally he chooses a character whose relation is similar to his. The tension is smaller here because the protagonist is largely passive, the story itself has less importance. The spectator here is really a spectator, does not really “act on” the work, but rather looks on. The tension here arises from recognition or realisation.

Examples: Shakespeare: King Lear, Ibsen: Peer Gynt, Osborne: Look Back in Anger; partly: Chekhov: Cherry Orchard

The two-level play

1. The term “mystery play” has not been used consistently in the Middle Ages; for example in England all religious plays were called miracles, in France, mystery, in Germany, Spil, the Latin authors called them ludus. Many of the Romantic authors called their poetic dramas “mysteries” (e.g. Byron, Cain). Shaw’s Back to Methuselah can be regarded as a mystery play; Man and Superman a morality play; and Saint Joan a miracle play. Or: Balázs Béla called Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (and The Fairy and The Blood of the Saint Virgin) “mysteries”.

2. Medieval mysteries and moralities. From the 14th century different cycles emerge in different countries that present the whole biblical story sometimes from the Creation to the crucifixion of Christ. Usually in spring or at the beginning of summer these cycles were performed for several days. They were called Biblical Spectacles, or Corpus Christi Plays or simply Spectacles. There are five basic English cycles (on the basis of where these plays were performed): York (48 plays), Wakefield (or Towneley), Chester (25 plays), Coventry (previously falsely associated with Coventry, also called N-town) and Cornwall. They contain altogether 89 plays. There was usually a link between the spectacle and the actors: Noah---shipbuilders. Last Supper---bakers, The Wedding of Canee, the three Magi---goldsmiths, Crucifixion---butchers, resurrection---carpenters, etc.

3. Theoretical problems. There are two levels presented. One is the objective world here and now, and the other is the divine, the eternal, the ideal. This is the place from where the laws come as to how should one behave in this world. In the actual world there is usually a force which wants to divert the man from the following of these divine rules (the evil, Satan, etc).

4. It’s usually the borderline of these two worlds where these plays take place. The play presents the relationship of these two levels (vertically situated) and what Man should do at the borderline of these two levels. The meeting of these two levels builds the situation. This divine level determines the whole present world.

5. There is no “real” everyday story; the relation of the two levels is presented in its reality, no need to bring in an external story (that would make the play a parable). As opposed to parables, which use a simple story to illustrate a moral teaching, moralities don’t have a proper “realistic” storyline, they present the teaching directly or through stories of saints or biblical characters. So there is a given metaphysical worlds, which contains pure morality – this is transplanted into this world as it would realise in the transcendental world, and not as in this world. So there is no everyday situation or character, or just in details that only refer to this world. They show the kind of behaviour that one has to take if he wants to get into Heaven.

6. There are two kinds of history according to the Catholic system of faith. History itself is timeless and motionless, because it is in God in whom the past, present and future live together. There is an “ideal” or universal appearance of this history, which is in the Bible, from the Creation to Christ’s Crucifixion and its end an conclusion is ultimately the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. This is a universal history since after the Last Judgement it becomes eternal. All that happens here can be conceived of as an element of this universal history. The mystery plays show only those ways of behaviour that are ideal and can connect the two levels. So the plays take place at two levels, e.g. the story of Abraham and Isaac show a story that could happen in present day life (the characters seem “real”), but the whole play is part of the universal history and vertically takes part in it. So while the conflict-based play can be imagined as a line, this can be imagined as two levels placed on each other in which the constant vibration between the 2 levels created tension. From this point of view every story in the Bible is dramatic, and can be made into a two-level play (which was done in the mystery cycles).

7. The relationship between the two levels is that of prefigure (this world) and figure (divine world). Figural interpretation makes a strong link between two events or persons in that the first does not mean only itself but the second as well, and the second involves the first. E.g. countless stories of the Old Testament are prefigures of those in the New Testament: for instance, the torment of Job by the Satan prefigures the sufferings of Christ; the crowning of Solomon foreshadows the crowning of Christ with a crown of thorn; the prophet Jeremiah in prison prefigures Jesus’ trial; the derision of Noah by his son, Ham refers to the humiliation of Christ during his trial. There may be more abstract correspondences: the fall of manna in the desert prefigures the Last Supper. Taking a later example, the three protagonists of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Cato, Vergil, Beatrice) when they appear in the otherworld, they fulfil their functions here, and their earthly life prefigures their life in the otherworld. The spectator of a medieval play could see the prefiguration of himself in a more or less everyday context. He could compare his behaviour with the characters and could see how he should behave in order to win the grace of God. This worldview infused the whole Medieval world: every real event or person was just the prefiguration or shadow of an authentic, universal history and truth.

8. Examples: Medieval mystery plays: Abraham and Isaac, Noah and the Flood, The Castle of Perseverance; later: Byron, Cain; Vörösmarty: Csongor és Tünde, Madách: Az ember tragédiája